Oracle, which positions itself as a complete cloud provider, reckons that enterprises of all sizes and across industry verticals, are increasingly looking to take advantage of its enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to accelerate innovation and unlock new growth opportunities. (Reuters)
Globally, as well as in India, businesses of all types are racing towards the cloud in an effort to achieve business agility. Oracle, which positions itself as a complete cloud provider, reckons that enterprises of all sizes and across industry verticals, are increasingly looking to take advantage of its enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to accelerate innovation and unlock new growth opportunities. At Oracle OpenWorld 2017 in San Francisco, this Silicon Valley firm gave a glimpse of its ramped up Oracle Cloud Platform—as its offerings are called. It introduced new developer-friendly technologies to its cloud portfolio and infused it all with a healthy dose of artificial intelligence. In his opening keynote, Oracle executive-chairman and CTO Larry Ellison stressed the revolutionary nature of machine learning and pitched Oracle’s autonomous database as unique to the industry. He introduced Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud, said to be the world’s first 100% self-driving autonomous database, and new automated cyber defence applications that detect and remediate attacks in real time.
With total automation based on machine learning, Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud eliminates the human labour required to manage a database by enabling a database to automatically upgrade, patch and tune itself while running. With no more scope for human error or requirements for human performance testing, Oracle is able to minimise costly planned and unplanned downtime to less than 30 minutes a year and guarantee that organisations can cut their costs in half compared to Amazon. “Amazon is five to eight times more expensive running the identical workload than the Oracle Autonomous Database,” he said.
Oracle also announced the availability of its cloud-native, highly-automated security and management suite. Ellison said that the new set of integrated suites—the Oracle Identity Security Operations Center (SOC) portfolio of services and Oracle Management Cloud—will help enterprises forecast, reduce, detect and remediate cybersecurity threats. “Companies are losing the cyber war and it gets bad every year. The way to prevent data theft is more automation,” the Oracle top boss said.
Moving to the cloud
Oracle claims to be the only cloud provider to deliver a complete cloud portfolio, spanning Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Platform as a Service (PaaS); Software as a Service (SaaS); and Data as a Service (DaaS). “With deep product knowledge, integration, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) built into every layer of the stack, customers can speed innovation with unmatched choice, cost and performance,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development. New cloud innovations spanning infrastructure, analytics, data management, and applications showcased at the annual event included IaaS; PaaS; Application Development Cloud Services; SaaS; and DaaS.
India in a sweet spot
Shailender Kumar, managing director, Oracle India, said an increasing number of Indian businesses are reaping the benefits of adopting the Oracle Cloud Platform. “We are witnessing a strong demand for our SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions in the country. Banks, telecom companies, government agencies, among others are working with us and owing to the strong security infrastructure Oracle provides; we have been able to dispel security concerns.” SaaS customers include SafeExpress, Indian Hotels, Shree Cements, Genpact, Indus Towers, Myntra, Tech Mahindra and Ferns & Petals.
In order to increase Oracle’s cloud footprint in India, he said, “We are going to go after all the major industries and the biggest place that opens up for us is the small and medium business. These are the ones who have not availed Oracle technologies in the past, so that is a huge market space for us.” With cloud, rapidly emerging economies like India can remove barriers to costly technology, open opportunities for new services and products, encourage small businesses, start-ups and new entrepreneurs, non-profit organisations and academia, and farmers to collaborate and share knowledge. Much of the current momentum is partly due to the adoption of digital technologies like cloud, and its underlying applications and platforms. “We are witnessing how Digital India programmes are adopting cloud and other digital disruptors, to help build an inclusive nation,” he said.
The Oracle India MD believes that start-ups are at the heart of innovation. “Unlike traditional accelerator programmes, the Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator programme is a next-generation acceleration initiative driven by Oracle’s research and development group. The programme provides six months of mentoring from technical and business experts, state-of-the-art technology, a co-working space, access to Oracle customers, partners and investors, and free Oracle Cloud credits.”
The writer was in San Francisco at the invitation of Oracle.
