Oracle top brass led out their annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on 10 September with a focus on the multicloud future but also a customer-centric love-in, as CEO Safra Catz took to the stage to laud the partnerships Oracle has built over its near-50 year lifespan to date.
With a number of major announcements made on the eve of the event, including a new partnership, Oracle Database@AWS, bringing it together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and expansions to previously-announced deals with Google and Microsoft, Catz spoke about how many of Oracle’s long-term rivals are now transitioning into technology partners, and how Oracle wants to be a better partner to its users. She marshalled a parade of some of Oracle’s biggest users to demonstrate this.
“There is no question our 47 years of Oracle are now finally all coming together with two things,” said Catz. “One, unbelievable capabilities in technology, and two, all of you, because you, our customers, are what brings this all together for us.
“Many of you have been with us for years and I hope you’ve seen us change…. No longer do we just provide technology, we are now your partner in making that technology come to life.”
Joining Catz on stage, Bill Hornbuckle, CEO and president of local employer MGM Resorts, who started his career as a bartender before being demoted to bussing tables, talked about how his organisation has grown alongside Las Vegas, from a rough and tumble backwater gambling town to a global resort, a world-class business and conference hub, and increasingly a destination for sports fans, with the recent arrival of Formula 1 and a Major League Baseball franchise soon to take up residence.
Hornbuckle went all in on Oracle Fusion at the start of the 2020s, and immediately realised significant benefits when he was forced to shutter his business during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
He is now bringing more AI capabilities to bear on his extensive hotel empire, which comprises 14 properties and tens of thousands of hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone.
Across its estate, said Hornbuckle, MGM Resorts receives something in the order of 15,000 to 20,000 inbound calls every day, seeking reservations and information, but with only 20% of those converting, the organisation is exploring using AI to handle the other 80% more efficiently.
Ultimately, he said, MGM Resorts wants to use Oracle to create tailored experiences for repeat visitors, who are many, using data on where they go, what they enjoy, and what they want, to create bespoke holiday packages.
Other customers taking to the main stage included the CIA – which technically became Oracle’s first customer in the mid-1970s when Larry Ellison built a database program for it – and banking powerhouse BNP Paribas.
Both these organisations talked up how they have used Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to supercharge their IT and data management, with CIA CISO La’Naia Jones referring to the intelligence agency as just like any regular enterprise in many ways.
Then, CloudFlare co-founder, president and COO Michelle Zatlyn described the integral role Oracle’s high-performance cloud plays in helping her organisation stop hundreds of thousands of attempted cyber attacks in their tracks, every day.
Ellison talks up multicloud
Later in the day, Larry Ellison, who turned 80 earlier this year, expanded on the theme of turning longstanding rivals into best multicloud buddies.
He lamented that the move to cloud at first caused the industry to lose sight of the idea that systems could be interoperable but this, he continued, is now rightly changing – as Oracle’s newly-minted partnership with AWS shows, he claimed.
“Customers typically use one or two or even three different infrastructure clouds,” said Ellison. “But today those clouds really don’t work well together. They’re not gracefully integrated.
“Some customers may want to move their Oracle databases and the applications that go with them from on-premise into AWS…. They’d like to use the Oracle Exadata Database cloud service inside of AWS.
“Multicloud interconnect … connecting the Oracle Cloud to AWS would make that possible. We can interconnect clouds and in some cases we have. But [that] is not optimal, it’s not the ideal solution.
“A much better approach would be if we embedded an Oracle Cloud datacentre right inside AWS,” he said.
The Oracle Database@AWS collab will become available in December of 2024, and according to Ellison and AWS CEO Matt Garman, who briefly joined Oracle’s founder on stage, the two are already seeing interested from customers excited about the possibilities.
Ellison said the growth of what he characterised as true multicloud propositions heralds a step change in enterprise computing, bringing convenience and choice for Oracle customers with connections into the major hyperscalers, and others as well.
“The interesting thing about this multicloud world is whichever cloud is, if you will, your primary cloud, you can reach out to other clouds, infrastructure clouds and very soon application clouds, and mix and match the applications and the services that you want,” he said.