Oracle CloudWorld 2024 delivers AI, database and OCI updates

Redefining 'customer-centric'

The customer-centric approach at the event was noticeable. The first keynote was all about making it real by having some big customers on stage with Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

The highlight for me was seeing CIO of the CIA, La'Naia Jones, on stage. The CIA was Oracle's first customer and continues to extensively leverage Oracle infrastructure in different ways, making it hard to refute Oracle's ability to meet the highest-tier security, scale and performance requirements of arguably the largest intelligence community agency in the world.

That customer access extended to the analyst summit, where the analyst relations team gave amazing access to many customers at different stages of their AI journeys. These are the conversations I personally love. What's good? What's bad? What's hype? Talking to customers tells the real story. And between OCI, Oracle Analytics Cloud and Fusion Data Intelligence, just to name a few, they were quite happy with not only what they have today but also where Oracle is going.

AI agents lead the way

Owning the infrastructure and the app stack gives Oracle an advantage unlike virtually any other enterprise tech company. It's almost unfair with Oracle being so embedded in the enterprise application space that it can innovate so rapidly within industries. And when customers buy into the whole stack, the optimizations are apparent. That shined through with how much focus was put on industry-specific announcements.

I was most taken aback by Oracle's AI agent story and all of the related announcements. The company announced AI assistants that will help its customers author, advise and recommend actions.

The agents are embedded within its apps, so customers can expect big productivity boosts across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing and service. This many agents with this much detail into the specific uses marks a new standard for what AI agent announcements must look like from the vendor community going forward. Hats off to Oracle for its transparency and commitment to furthering the development of AI agents for use within its applications.

Some specific application updates that stuck out to me were the new user experience enhancements in Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, a new energy and water data intelligence offering, and healthcare features such as medical supply tracking, automated replenishment and real-time inventory visibility. The goals of all of these new products are to help organizations unify their data, accelerate AI, increase productivity, expand visibility and accelerate processes.

OCI updates

There were several OCI updates, but for me the big ones were Oracle launching a new generative AI RAG Agent that's a fully managed service. The update makes it easy to use Oracle AI Vector Search without any manual integrations.

The second big update was the addition of capabilities to help customers accelerate the development of applications and deployment on OCI with the new Oracle Code Assist. Oracle also launched a massive AI supercomputer in the cloud and placed a big focus on AI and data sovereignty with Nvidia that helps organizations build and maintain sovereign AI models in their country or retain AI-generated data with strong data residency controls.

New foundational data lake

The last big update is the introduction of Oracle Intelligent Data Lake to serve as the foundation of the Oracle Data Intelligence Platform, bringing together open data formats, a unified catalog and modern developer experiences.

You might be thinking that Oracle is late to the party here and at first glance, you're right. Where the differentiation comes in for Oracle is back to the fact that it owns the whole stack. The application layer and its tight integration with everything Oracle delivers is what really makes the magic happen. And right now, nobody else can deliver as complete a story across as many business applications as Oracle. That's not hyperbole -- that's just a fact.

Mike Leone is a principal analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, where he covers data, analytics and AI.

Enterprise Strategy Group analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.