Andrew Sutherland, SVP, Technology & Systems, EMEA, Oracle spoke at Oracle OpenWorld Dubai 2019 about technology innovations that have led to Oracle Cloud Generation 2 that drive businesses to evolve and improve.

Emerging technologies are driving change faster than we’ve ever seen before. They’re reshaping the very way in which we interact with each other as human beings, consumers, citizens, trading partners, etc. Technology is also disrupting businesses and entire industries. This isn’t new.

Around the world, innovation is changing the way humans interact with technology and data. Continuous innovation and invention help create newer tools so humans can progress even faster. Innovation makes people push boundaries and think of what else is possible as technologies continue to evolve and improve.

Users need to ask themselves, “How do we harness the disruption that comes from innovation and technologies and turn it to our advantage so that we can progress?”

Try this exercise:

• Think of a few things in your life or your business unit or organization that are of value. It’s probably a long list.
• All of these valuable items can now be subjected to a few questions:
  • How is that value created today?
  • Given new technologies today, could that value be created more efficiently and, perhaps, at less cost?
  • Could somebody else deliver it cheaper and quicker?

As all of this technology innovation continues, we keep asking the question and readdressing what new possibilities exist in the world. This redefines how businesses run and how people work and live. It’s all about realizing the incredible new opportunities in front of us.

The role of Oracle in all of this has remained consistent throughout the years of technology innovation. Oracle continues to work to create tools that allow others to manage their information better. These tools might be complete business applications that manage your processes, platform tools that move and store your data, infrastructure tools that crunch the digits, etc. More recently, these tools have been made available as a service from the Cloud. Customers can plug into this service without having to configure, install, or run it themselves.

There is more innovation and capability in these offerings than ever before. It’s important to understand how it’s all used in order to learn how to harness it. Oracle has worked over the years to hear what customers are saying they want, and Oracle has developed tools to try to meet those needs. The combination of these tools has led to the creation of Oracle Cloud Generation 2. The key benefits of Oracle Cloud Generation 2 cannot be understated.

To help breakdown the tools that Oracle has developed as part of Oracle Cloud Generation 2, Andrew brought Steve Daheb, SVP, Cloud Business at Oracle. Andrew and Steve began walking through some of the tools that Oracle has been developing—Intelligent Business Applications, Autonomous Database, and the platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that support it all.

Oracle Intelligent Business Applications

Oracle has been embedding emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Internet of Things into Intelligent Business Applications. Intelligent Business Applications are seamlessly connected applications that enable organizations and people to be more informed, productive and engaged. Users will be more plugged into their organization, which allows them to be productive and continue to innovate.

Business applications are moving away from being passive applications that respond to requests and needs. They are instead moving toward becoming active business advisors that use Machine Learning to understand, from history, what might be the best course of action to take in any given circumstance.

Part of Oracle’s strategy is to have emerging technologies permeate every aspect and layer of Cloud—from the applications, to the platform, and the underlying infrastructure that supports these new, modern workloads like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT.

Oracle is embedding these emerging technologies as features within the services that it provides to customers. These features will help drive real business outcomes. The graphic below shows how some of these technologies are embedded into ERP Cloud, SCM Cloud, HCM Cloud, and CX Cloud:

In addition, Oracle has worked to embed IoT into its business applications. Here are some examples of how IoT is working within Oracle Intelligent Business Applications:

Oracle Apps + Platform

In addition to embedding emerging technologies into applications, Oracle has also provided an underlying platform that allows customers to build their own technologies and applications. Having multiple layers of the Cloud is what makes Oracle unique, and Oracle has been able to seamlessly integrate the application layer with the platform layer.

With this underlying platform, customers can:

• Move on-premises applications with customizations to Cloud
• Connect applications and extend capabilities
• Gain insights through analytics spanning applications and data
• Secure access across hybrid and multi-Cloud

This platform provides customers with a choice to leverage Oracle apps or develop their own. The features are built into applications, but there is also a development platform with Machine Learning-based tools that enable customers to build their own intelligent applications.

Oracle Autonomous Database

We live in the information age, and data is the fuel of the information age. However, data has its issues. Unfortunately, it’s relatively easy to steal data. In addition, data is quite fragile. It takes a lot of time and effort to look after data. The more it’s used, the more valuable it becomes. It’s important to make sure it’s accessible and available all the time while still keeping it secure.

The costs of doing so were reasonable as long as the amounts of data were reasonable. However, in the age of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, we need more and more data. This means that the cost of managing this data securely while making it accessible can become overwhelming.

Maybe it’s time for machines come to our aid again. Maybe it’s time for data to stand on its own two feet, manage itself, and make itself available as a service. This is where the Oracle Autonomous Database comes in.

Oracle Autonomous Database is the next generation of Database Cloud services. This innovative offering will help eliminate human labor via machine learning. It is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing. These key attributes help customers save on costs and time. As they use resources to meet their needs, customers can scale the system up when they need it and down when they don’t. They can save up to 70 percent on ongoing run-time costs.

From a security perspective, in over 85 percent of cases where a security breach occurred, there was already a patch available for that breach up to a year in advance of the occurrence. The power of a platform that self-patches autonomously can help customers secure assets and avoid these types of security breaches and the costs associated with them. Not only do the costs cause damage, but security breaches can damage company reputation and stakeholder value. Leveraging the power of Machine Learning and Autonomous Database to address security will make a big difference.

In addition to avoiding the risk of security breaches, the Oracle Autonomous Database helps reduce costs by up to 80 percent and allows users to focus on innovation. Shifting the focus to innovation allows users to free up time for employees to focus on higher value tasks and accelerate productivity and time to insights.

There are two flavors of the Oracle Autonomous Database that are optimized by workload. Users can leverage the Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) or Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP). ADW is optimized for analytics, and ATP is optimized for transactions.

The secret sauce for the success of the Autonomous Database is the combination of automated database operations, policy-driven optimization and machine learning, and database optimized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

As data continues to explode, Autonomous Database is the best resource to help users handle all of their data.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

OCI is the second-generation Cloud and a foundation for AI. It leverages autonomous and other Oracle Cloud services.

Often, in the world of IT, many forget the importance of the foundation. Many times, users build elaborate, complex functionality and structures on a foundation that might work today but won’t necessarily work tomorrow when it’s put under pressure and stress in a real Cloud world. This worried Oracle. It’s easy to make things look good on the surface, but the foundation is vitally important.

To reconcile this problem, Oracle developed a completely new infrastructure for the Cloud. The team started from scratch. It wasn’t an evolution of an existing architecture or a bolt-on—it was the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure utilized multi-cloud, core-to-edge security. It can dramatically lower compute costs and new high-performance workloads via new enhancements and partnerships. Users can also expand OCI data center coverage. This is the first architecture especially designed for hyper-scale Cloud.

However, Oracle Generation 2 Cloud is more than just the underlying infrastructure. There is a suite of services that span app dev, integration of Oracle and non-Oracle apps both on-prem and in the Cloud, analytics for reporting and visualization, layers of security defense apps, users, data and infrastructure, and the Oracle Autonomous Database. All of these components make up the Oracle Generation 2 Cloud that is autonomous, secure and extensible.