Last week, I had an opportunity to attend CloudWorld 2024. Oracle uses its flagship event to unveil the most important announcements of the year, and after the break caused by the Covid pandemic, it was moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas. To be honest, I’m not a fan of the city’s scorching heat (it was over 40 degrees C outside at times). Thankfully, the agenda created by the company’s analyst relations team was so packed that I spent most of the four days inside the air-conditioned venue, attending keynotes and sessions, talking to Oracle’s executives and customers, and, of course, networking with other analysts. Here are some of my takeaways from the event.
The Open Multi-cloud Era
The beginning of this era has been announced by Larry Ellison in his keynote, when it was unveiled that Oracle now has strategic partnerships with each of the Big Three cloud providers to make Oracle Autonomous Database available directly in their respective infrastructures, with full feature parity with OCI’s own services and without the latency issues of traditional multi-cloud deployments. What it essentially means that Oracle’s engineers deploy the company’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, specifically its Exadata platform and Oracle databases, directly in Microsoft’s, Google’s, and AWS’ own cloud datacenters and make it available to their customers through the native user interface, billing, and technical support channels of each provider.
Now, some purists might argue that this architecture is not really multi-cloud, since everything is contained within the infrastructure of each provider, and data does not flow between clouds (which, incidentally, is great news for AWS customers, since they don’t need to worry about egress fees). However, what’s important for customers is that they can now combine the best native services of each provider with all the latest features of the database they know and love for decades.
There is something ironic about Oracle going full circle—from the company’s roots in offering “a database that runs everywhere” on-premises to the new cloud model introducing a whole zoo of partially incompatible database services across providers to finally bringing the same “everywhere” promise back to life at an entirely different scale.
On a somewhat related note—the concept of “private cloud” is also undergoing a profound change. Oracle is known for offering a broad range of cloud deployment options to their customers—calling this flexible portfolio their “Distributed Cloud”. This year, the company announced the new OCI Dedicated Region25 that will be available in a smaller, scalable size starting at only three racks and rapidly deployable within weeks. It has a 75% smaller launch footprint and simplified datacenter requirements and supports OCI’s 150+ AI and cloud services. What used to be possible only for large enterprises is now much more affordable.
AI Transforms Everything
Of course, artificial intelligence was another major topic during the conference—for both the company and its customers and partners. And Oracle had tons of announcements of new AI features and capabilities throughout their entire portfolio. At the infrastructure level, for example, OCI Supercluster, announced for 2025, will be the largest ever hardware platform, labeled as a Zettascale supercomputer, powered by over 100K Nvidia GPUs to run the most demanding AI workloads.
Both Oracle Database 23ai and HeatWave offer a multitude of built-in AI capabilities, from somewhat overlooked but still extremely useful machine learning algorithms to vector search that brings enterprise data to generative AI models. Needless to say, the big differentiator for both solutions, as opposed to specialized vector databases, is the ability to keep data in multiple formats (relational, graph, JSON, and now vector) in the same database and to run complex hybrid queries across them. We had an opportunity to hear from customers already using these capabilities in production, and the general agreement was that it just worked without any additional learning curve.
All Oracle’s industry apps and business analytics solutions have received major new AI-powered capabilities as well. Curiously, even Oracle APEX, the company’s “hidden gem”, the low-code application development platform, has received a major boost from the AI hype. For quite a while already, the APEX team has been working on a new programming language, more abstract and human-readable, to replace its original PL/SQL and make APEX much more compatible with modern CI/CD pipelines. However, this development, in the form of an AI Assistant, also enabled them to make APEX apps generatable using a conversational approach. Apparently, using this technology internally already allows Oracle to develop their business apps 10 times faster.
One major concern I was happy to hear addressed during the event is what I call “AI agility.” Just like with cryptography, where quantum computers can potentially make existing algorithms irrelevant overnight, the current state of the AI market is also extremely unpredictable. Who knows which vendors, models, and algorithms will still survive in the next five years? Any sensible organization should be prepared to be agile with their AI deployments and ready to address these risks.
Securing Apps with Data Robots
Apparently, Larry Ellison loves robots. At least that was his term for Oracle’s approach towards security. To secure sensitive data in the cloud at a massive scale, humans are no longer good enough. Automation is the only viable approach, and Oracle has a plan for that, too. Needless to say, their robot DBA is, of course, the Oracle Autonomous Database, and by next year, they promise to migrate all their apps and services to it, eliminating the human factor from database operations and security. They also plan to get rid of password-based authentication completely, which is definitely a welcome if somewhat bold promise.
Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR) is another promising development, introducing the identity component and security attributes to the network fabric of the Oracle Cloud. This approach combines Zero Trust with policy-based access controls to ensure that security policies can be applied independently of the underlying network configuration. This technology is currently in early access.
My biggest takeaway from CloudWorld 2024 is that Oracle is not just delivering a long list of new features for its customers—all of these developments are incorporated into the company’s entire product and service portfolio. In the end, Oracle is not afraid of eating its own dog food while customers gain value from Oracle’s integrated, full-stack approach.