Oracle is betting big on the scalability and reliability of its cloud offerings, as it looks to convince customers that off-the-shelf AI agents grounded in secure data can meet business needs better than the bells and whistles of its competitors.

In the opening keynote at Oracle AI World Tour London, Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia said mass adoption of generative AI has rapidly accelerated the pace of innovation and demand for new breakthroughs.

“Expectations in the age of AI haven't simply risen,” Sicilia said, “they've reset entirely and remarkable things that felt out of touch just a few years ago, a few months ago, and in some cases just a few weeks ago, are now the new normal.”

To meet this demand, he said, Oracle is looking to reengineer the cloud behind the scenes so that enterprises can adopt, deploy, and manage their data and enterprise AI tools as easily as possible.

Nothing Sicilia said on stage would have come as a great surprise to attendees. In fact, the most surprising thing to me throughout the keynote was the confidence with which Oracle is promoting its ‘stay the course’ approach to cloud and AI in 2026.

Scalable cloud for reliable AI

Oracle’s pitch is simple: scale and stability. Rather than becoming overcomplicated with AI additions, Oracle intends for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to facilitate AI adoption. This is a ‘more is more’ approach to customer choice.

Sicilia argued that only with dependable cloud infrastructure and the option for customers to choose their own AI model, data formats, and cloud residency, can AI success really be achieved.

“It’s no secret that at Oracle, we are building the world’s largest AI cloud,” Sicilia said.

“We think that this will all show up where the work actually happens, and that is servicing the AI directly in the applications and workflows that you're already living in, right at your fingertips. Whether you're in finance, HR, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, financial services and beyond.”

At Oracle AI World Tour London 2026, the firm unveiled 22 new Fusion Agentic Applications in line with this goal, powered by off-the-shelf AI agents trained in enterprise-specific tasks including identifying sales opportunities, coordinating supply chain operations, and automating cash flow.

We’ll have to wait and see if these agents deliver a real return on investment.

While data and fine-tuning play a major role in the success of AI deployment, Oracle sticks out as a hyperscaler without AI models of its own. Google Cloud offers its customers first-party Gemini offerings and Microsoft Azure boasts privileged access to OpenAI’s model catalog. AWS – which doesn’t spring to mind when I hear ‘frontier model developer’ – has put in work with its Nova model family, even if analysts question its confidence in the offering.

Oracle, by contrast, has no models of its own, nor an exclusivity deal with a major frontier lab. Though it was quick to form partnership with AI developer Cohere in 2023, whose models form the basis for Oracle NetSuite’s generative AI features, Oracle has subsequently bet on an agnostic approach.

Let’s get this out of the way: there’s obvious merit for the strength of OCI for running intense compute for enterprise AI. This is particularly when it comes to tasks such as training and fine-tuning LLMs, as Steve Miranda, EVP of Oracle Applications Development, explained to assembled media at the event.

“We have significant technical advantage in OCI, especially around the speed of network and security, which is why the Nvidia infrastructure runs best on OCI, which is why most, if not all, the top large language models in the world have chosen OCI to train their models,” said Miranda.

I suspect, however, that this won’t matter so much at the enterprise level. Business leaders aren’t generally looking to train or even fine-tune their own LLMs, they’re looking to deploy whichever pre-made AI tool delivers them the most value.

Customers willing to forgo flexibility and an open ecosystem in the name of the latest end-to-end AI deployment may find their head turned by Azure with its OpenAI tie ups, or the first-party model developer Google Cloud.

In the face of this competition, Oracle’s commitment to openness reads more like a bet against AI innovation, not for it. The offerings that Oracle thinks are make or break for customer retention aren’t AI at all, but Oracle Databases.

Indeed, Oracle has even gone to the length of partnering with other hyperscalers to make Oracle AI Database services available alongside competitor offerings. In these circumstances, customers can make use of OCI Exadata hardware directly next to, or even in, data centers run by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for low latency ease of access. This could be a major draw for customers looking for a low-friction, multi-cloud approach.

Nathan Thomas, SVP of product management, OCI at Oracle, explained how customer demand has driven OCI to support a varied, multi-cloud strategy.

“We hear from customers all the time that they want to use their AI pipelines in those environments,” he said.

“They want to be using Vertex, they want to be using Copilot, Sagemaker, Bedrock, and they want to have their data local to that, low latency, high performance, accessibility to it. But they still need to take all the governance with them.”

Over the long-term, Oracle is betting that customers will stick with it for both its openness and consistent, full-stack approach. Frankly, it’s too late to now change course – it can’t compete with the likes of Google Cloud for walled-garden AI capabilities and it seems to know this.

“There is nothing special, from a technical perspective, about the agents we build,” Miranda said, adding that the framework Oracle lets customers run its agents in a wide range of agentic frameworks.

Customers may choose stability, and neutrality, over specialization and the potential for lock-in when they choose their cloud provider. The uphill challenge for Oracle is convincing customers that this ‘nothing special’ approach is enough to give them an edge over competitors.

A simple and scalable foundation for enterprise data

Sicilia says one of Oracle’s major strengths is there’s “only one version of OCI”, allowing customers to plan for deployment without having to plan for compromises or region-specific versions.

“The form factor, the physical location, whether or not it's consumed in a multi-cloud environment, it doesn't matter,” he said.

“There's one version and that is, we think, to the customer’s advantage because we're able to look at all of the services, 100% of the services, no matter how big or how small the data center is, no matter how big or how small the consumption model is, as well as all the same privacy, security, cyber defenses.”

Thomas explained that Oracle’s approach allows customers to trust in a consistent application experience. He added that specializing in the creation of small clouds has fed directly into Oracle’s capacity for running private, distributed cloud regions directly in customer data centers, an offering he described as “a huge part of our sovereignty play”.

While digital sovereignty is a huge focus for hyperscalers, Oracle hopes its full-stack approach – as outlined by Sicilia – will help it stand out from the competition.

“This is an area where we really feel like a lot of the other cloud vendors have been let off the hook,” Thomas said.

“There's some sort of idea that, ‘hey, what OCI is doing is super special or different’. We kind of think that's backwards. You know, every cloud really should by default be able to scale down, like we've got all 150 OCI web services available on all of those form factors, the pricing is the same in all those environments, and it’s still metered billing the way that we have in any public region.”

Oracle is striving to meet rising demand for sovereign cloud in Europe amid geopolitical uncertainty and a push for reduced reliance on US cloud providers. The strength, in practice, of sovereign cloud controls compared to those offered by competing hyperscalers depends on the level of separation customers desire and unknowns such as the US CLOUD Act.

Like its competitors, Oracle argues that it offers ‘operator sovereignty’, allowing workloads segregated from the public cloud to be run not just within specific regions but by staff who are residents of that region. But this wouldn’t be enough to protect EMEA data from the US CLOUD Act, should Oracle choose to comply with a government directive to access data.

With geopolitics where it is, I suspect Oracle is making the argument a few years too late. European giants such as Airbus reportedly moving critical apps to a sovereign European cloud and White House PR surrounding Oracle becoming TikTok’s US secure cloud provider may have strengthened the association between the firm and the US government in the minds of EMEA customers.

It feels to me like sentiment toward US cloud providers across EMEA only goes in one direction right now, no matter how enticing the offer. In these conditions, Oracle may need to do more to lure new customers in and this may mean going beyond the slow and stable approach to which it’s currently committed.

Oracle has announced a slew of new enterprise AI applications, powered by pre-trained AI agents, in a push to deliver secure, proactive AI productivity.

Fusion Agentic Applications are made up of AI agent 'teams', which work proactively to meet business objectives via outcome-driven AI reasoning.

The apps are built directly into Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, which Oracle said ensures the tools follow strict governance rules and can operate across an entire business environment in real time.

Oracle announced the new apps at Oracle AI World Tour in London, its annual regional event bringing together partners and customers at Excel London.

Within each app, agents powered by frontier large language models (LLMs) work together to complete a task. Each has its own role, authority, and expertise, with the entire app secured using existing guardrails in a customer's Oracle Fusion Applications security framework.

"The way work gets done no longer matches the speed, complexity, or expectations of modern business as too much time is spent managing processes instead of driving outcomes," said Steve Miranda, EVP Oracle Applications Development at Oracle.

"With Fusion Agentic Applications, we are moving enterprise software beyond passive systems of record and providing our customers with applications that can reason, decide, and act in pursuit of defined business objectives. This is a huge step forward for the industry and will help our customers achieve faster outcomes, focus their valuable time on strategic activities, and redefine how work works."

At the time of launch, Oracle has announced 22 Fusion Agentic Applications across functions such as HR, supply chain, payroll, and customer experience.

This includes the Cross-Sell Program Workspace Agentic Application, intended to help sales workers lower customer acquisition costs and identify growth opportunities, and the Workforce Operations Agentic Application, to automate manual HR work.

Other applications target even more specific functions, such as the Design-to-Source Workspace Agentic Application, for coordinating supply chain operations and lowering product cost, and the Collectors Workspace Agentic Application, which is designed for continuous, intelligent cash flow to assist finance teams.

Agentic processes native to OCI

In the opening keynote of the event, Miranda said the quickest wins will be secured in enterprise "pain point" areas such as the supply chain, finance, and service.

Fusion Agentic Applications can access data from across an enterprise environment, with persistent context capabilities that allow the agents to draw on prior conversations, history, and user intent.

Oracle said the data the applications can draw on reduces the need for users to restate objectives and improves the ability for each sub-agent to reason on an outcome based on situational conditions.

"So what an agentic app allows our customers to do is interact with the system, give real-time business objectives, Miranda explained.

"Because the agents are embedded into Fusion, because we're aware of all the data that flows through your transactions, we can present to the user some recommendations and choices – the agent, rather, can present that."

"The introduction of Oracle Fusion Agentic Applications represents a meaningful shift in enterprise software by moving beyond task automation to outcome-driven execution on the journey to an autonomous enterprise," said Mark Smith, chief AI and software analyst at ISG.

"As organizations look to scale automation across their business, having a platform that can coordinate agents across functions while keeping security and approvals inside the application suite will be an important differentiator."

New agent builder within OCI

In addition to the new apps, Oracle announced an expansion to Oracle AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications intended to make AI agents easier to build and deploy.

The development platform now supports the new agentic applications, which customers can edit and manage using natural language input.

Oracle said that customers can use AI Agent Studio to extend the capabilities of off the shelf Fusion Agentic Applications, or build entirely new ones that integrate within Oracle Fusion Applications in the same way as those built by the hyperscaler.

Within Oracle AI Agent Studio, customers can also orchestrate, validate, test, and manage agents they customize or create. The platform also provides access to more than 63,000 certified experts, with whom customers can work to pick out use cases for the applications, how to achieve optimal performance, and the best strategies for deployment.

Oracle has announced a new agentic platform for retail banking, featuring a suite of AI applications, design tools, frameworks, and pre-built AI agents.

The applications are designed to automate core banking processes while keeping humans in control of decisions.

Oracle said the aim here is to help financial institutions deliver hyper-personalized services, whether the customer is banking online, using a mobile device, or visiting a physical branch.

These agents can orchestrate seamless, real-time, and highly tailored interactions, Oracle claimed, supported by human expertise for oversight and ethical governance.

“Oracle is ushering in a new era of banking where AI moves beyond task automation to deliver real business intelligence, agility, and trust at scale,” said Sovan Shatpathy, senior vice president for product management and development at Oracle Financial Services.

What Oracle is offering

The platform includes a number of new experience and domain agents for retail banking.

For example, the Product Brochure Generation agent and Smart Assist for Application Insights agent make it easier to maintain consistent product information and provide bankers with more accurate real-time answers to speed up application processes.

The Application Tracker agent delivers proactive management by predicting delays and recommending next steps. Oracle said this will enable a smooth handoff to underwriting staff, for example, while keeping the lead banker informed on the status of application approval.

Elsewhere, the Qualitative Analysis & Credit Decisioning agent draws on in-house data to suggest responses for complex scorecards, resulting in faster and more consistent credit decisions.

‘Experience agents’ look to boost automation

Experience agents in other retail domains, such as collections, also aim to improve productivity and efficiency for banking staff, the company said. These particular agents will automate compliance-related tasks, reducing staff workloads.

The Collector Call Summarization agent generates call notes from transcripts, dramatically reducing after-handle time (AHT).

Meanwhile, the Call Compliance Check agent analyzes call tone and sentiment for adherence to regulation such as the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, providing bankers instant feedback on compliance scores.

Over the next 12 months, Oracle said it plans to launch hundreds more retail and corporate banking agents.

“Our agentic platform is not just a set of applications, it’s a foundational architecture for building truly intelligent banks," said Shatpathy.

"By combining domain specific AI, human-in-the-loop governance, and enterprise grade scalability, we’re enabling banks to drive proactive, hyper-personalized engagement while innovating responsibly and competitively.”

Late last year, Oracle announced its new AI Agent Marketplace, offering AI agent templates from approved Oracle partners and systems integrators, aimed at providing enterprises with flexible options based on their individual needs.

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Oracle has announced an expansion of a deal with the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) as the government department ramps up IT modernization efforts.

As part of the expansion, a new cloud agreement will enable the MoD to move legacy tech systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (ICO), underpinning its ongoing modernization goals.

The agreement will also support adoption of new AI tools, according to the MoD, and streamline data access and security.

“The OCI agreement strengthens the long standing strategic relationship between MoD and Oracle, and reflects the MoDs multi-vendor strategy to leverage the best available technologies to deliver operational outcomes and greater efficiency,” said Victoria Cope, commercial director for the MoD.

According to Cope, the new agreement also includes commitments to support digital skills development at the MoD, supporting the “wider defence and UK government agenda to build a digitally skilled workforce”.

Oracle doubling down on defence ties

This latest agreement for Oracle builds on long-standing ties with the UK government and broader public sector, including deals with the Cabinet Office and Crown Commercial Service (CCS).

The MoD itself is undergoing significant IT modernization in a bid to enhance operational efficiency, deliver improvements to decision making, and to bolster cybersecurity capabilities.

Overhauling legacy systems has been a long-running challenge for the department, with a 2022 report from the National Audit Office (NAO) warning the MoD had neither the appropriate IT infrastructure nor workforce digital skills capabilities to meet long-term modernization goals.

With the advent of generative AI, the MoD has set a goal to become an “AI-ready organization”, Oracle noted, and one that treats data as a “strategic asset”.

“The UK MoD is moving quickly to use data and AI in far more sophisticated ways to strengthen national security for UK citizens,” said Jason Rees, SVP for technology engineers at Oracle EMEA.

“Migrating workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will allow it to do this rapidly and at scale, without complicated and costly rewrites. The MoD will benefit from OCI’s in-built security and AI solutions, providing a resilient foundation for faster innovation, improved decision making and mission ready capabilities.”

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Not content with a new supercomputer and AI cluster at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has put in an order for a further two, this time to be housed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).

The two AI supercomputers, named Solstice and Equinox, will be created by Oracle and Nvidia and have been tipped as a future “powerhouse for scientific and technological innovation” by US secretary of energy Chris White.

Solstice is the bigger of the supercomputers, with what Nvidia claims is a “record-breaking” 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. Equinox, meanwhile, will feature 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and will be the first to be completed, with an estimated delivery date of H1 2026.

There’s no date given for Solstice, but once it comes online the two will be connected to Equinox via Nvidia networking to deliver an expected 2,200 exaflops of “AI performance”, according to Nvidia. This would make the cluster more powerful than Frontier – the first exascale supercomputer – or the current most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan.

This will be a combined output, however, rather than per supercomputer and it’s unclear at this point whether it’s Rmax, a verified output achieved on the HPL benchmark, or Rpeak, a theoretical maximum output.

ITPro approached Oracle for more technical details of its involvement, but did not receive any information at the time of publication.

Commenting on the announcement, Paul Kearns, director of ANL said: “The Equinox and Solstice systems are designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific AI workflows, and we are collaborating with Oracle and NVIDIA to prepare thousands of researchers to effectively leverage the systems’ groundbreaking capabilities.

“This system will seamlessly connect to forefront DoE experimental facilities such as our Advanced Photon Source, allowing scientists to address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges through scientific discovery.”

DoE supercomputer tsunami

Solstice and Equinox aren’t the only supercomputers to be announced by the DoE this week. On Monday 27 October, HPE revealed it was building a new supercomputer for the agency, called Discovery, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in collaboration with AMD. This is in addition to an AI cluster called Lux that will also feature AMD chips and networking.

Similarly, Nvidia announced a collaboration with HPE to create another two supercomputers – Vision and Mission – for the DoE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Like Discovery, this will be based on HPE’s Cray GX5000 supercomputing system but will feature Nvidia Vera Rubin CPUs, Rubin GPUs, and Quantum-X800 Infiniband networking. Like most of the other announcements this week, there’s no hard date for delivery of these systems other than “in the coming years”.

A final three Nvidia-based supercomputers – Tara, Minerva, and Janus – were also announced but are even lighter on detail; other than their names and that they will be located again at ANL, no further information has been given.

The US DoE is one of the primary consumers of supercomputing technology. The top three spots in the Top500 table of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are occupied by DoE systems:

• El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Frontier at ORNL
• Aurora at ANL, where Solstice and Equinox will also be sited

All three existing DoE supercomputers are relatively new as well. El Capitan came online in 2024, Frontier in 2021, and Aurora in 2023.

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OpenAI has lined up more than $1 trillion in spending – and now it's trying to figure out how to pay for it all.

Over the last few weeks, the AI leader has signed a $300 billion contract with Oracle as well as multi-billion dollar deals with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom.

Reports of this huge spending spree have echoed across the AI industry, fueling concerns that the bubble is about to burst. If bullish AI companies can't pay their bills, infrastructure providers could find themselves out of pocket.

And no wonder there are concerns. Though these deals are staggered over several years, OpenAI last year posted revenue of about $10 billion.

While that's expected to double this year, that's still a far cry from being able to cover such bills – and don't forget that this time last year OpenAI was scrounging up $6 billion from investors to stay in business.

How is OpenAI paying for this?

OpenAI has plans to pay for it all, according to reports from the Financial Times, which note that about 70% of OpenAI's $13 billion in annual recurring revenue comes from consumer versions of ChatGPT.

Indeed, in January CEO Sam Altman said the tech giant was "currently losing money on OpenAI Pro subscriptions" because people used them so heavily.

Given that, the first goal is to double the number of paying subscribers from just 5% of the total 800m or so globally, perhaps by offering cheaper access in more places beyond India.

Another revenue boost is the addition of a checkout in ChatGPT, letting OpenAI take a slice of purchases. Advertisement revenue is another consideration, though CEO Sam Altman has said OpenAI would only do ads "with great caution".

Beyond leveraging ChatGPT's popularity with consumers, the FT reported that OpenAI plans to make use of its expertise to help develop AI infrastructure improvements, something that could prove popular with the companies it's signed all those deals with.

The tech company is also working with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive on an AI-powered personal assistant device.

Beyond those ideas, OpenAI is hoping it can continue to raise funds from investors – and believes expensive compute costs will fall thanks to competition in the sector.

Circular deals

Another solution is to be found in the deals themselves. The partnerships with Nvidia and AMD have been both described as “circular”. For example, Nvidia is investing $100 billion in the company to let it buy Nvidia’s highly sought-after chips.

Meanwhile, AMD has offered up 160 million shares for a penny apiece to help fund its shopping spree.

The FT cited an unnamed source who had advised the company, who suggested the current deal setup with a host of industry stakeholders makes perfect sense given the bold ambitions the company has.

"I don’t view them as drunken sailors going to bars and laying down IOUs everywhere,” they told the publication.

“It might look and feel that way, but this is actually a strategy backed up by technology, products, business plans and visibility into what is happening."

A complete account of OpenAI deals

All told, the FT estimates OpenAI has signed on for more than 26 gigawatts of computing capacity at a cost of more than $1 trillion. However, that covers the next several years of deployments and many of the plans are tiered, so they can be clawed back or ditched if not needed.

Last week, OpenAI and Broadcom announced they were working on 10 gigawatts of compute together; though financial details weren't disclosed, CNBC estimated that each 1 gigawatt costs a whopping $50 billion at the moment.

Elsewhere, OpenAI confirmed a $300 billion deal with Oracle over the next five years as part of the $500 billion infrastructure project known as Stargate.

Alongside that, Nvidia and OpenAI announced a partnership that could see the chipmaker invest as much as $100 billion into the AI company, which will buy hardware from Nvidia to build up to 10 gigawatts of compute.

Shortly after, OpenAI and AMD announced a deal worth as much as $100 billion over several years, that could see OpenAI take a 10% stake in AMD as it deploys 6 gigawatts of the chipmaker's GPUs.

Earlier this year, OpenAI signed a five-year, $12 billion deal with CoreWeave for infrastructure as it started to step away from Microsoft. OpenAI even tried to buy AI coding startup Windsurf for $3 billion, but lost out to Cognition instead.

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Oracle has announced the launch of a new marketplace where customers can access a range of AI agents.

Unveiled at the company’s annual CloudWorld conference, the cloud computing giant said the move aims to ramp up agentic AI adoption and provide enterprises with a variety of options.

The marketplace will primarily feature AI agent templates and options from approved Oracle partners and systems integrators, but independent software vendors such as Box, Stripe, and Loqate are also featured.

“The age of intelligent automation has arrived, and in order to stay competitive, organisations need solutions that are powerful, scalable, and easy to adopt,” said Chris Leone, executive vice president of applications development at Oracle.

“With Oracle AI Agent Marketplace, we’re helping our customers fast-track enterprise AI adoption, address their unique business needs, and streamline operations by bringing our growing network of partner expertise directly into our AI ecosystem”.

So what can Oracle customers expect from the new marketplace setup?

Under the hood of the Oracle AI Agent Marketplace

The new marketplace will feature partner-built agent templates that customers can choose based on their individual needs.

A host of systems integrators from the Oracle PartnerNetwork are involved in the scheme, the company revealed, including IBM Consulting, Wipro, Apex IT, and more.

Other systems integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC also have agent templates for joint customers.

As an example, Oracle pointed to KPMG’s Purchase Order Item Price History agent, which is designed to help enterprises streamline procurement processes.

“It can reduce manual research time and deliver deeper insights to optimize negotiation strategies by providing rapid access to historical purchase order data such as previous suppliers, purchase dates, average price over past orders, and actionable pricing insights for current orders,” the company explained in a statement.

One-stop agent shops are the new big thing

The launch of the Oracle service marks the latest in a string of marketplace launches from big AI and cloud providers in recent months.

In September, Microsoft announced the launch of its own marketplace where customers can pick and choose from a range of in-house and third-party product options.

The ‘Microsoft Marketplace’ features products spanning cloud solutions, AI applications, and agent templates for enterprise users.

Elsewhere, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has continually updated its Bedrock service. First launched in mid-2024,

Amazon Bedrock was initially intended as a marketplace for AI models, providing customers with access to tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, and its own in-house options – agents are now available through the marketplace.

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Safra Catz has stepped down as CEO of Oracle, with two insiders stepping up to take over the company.

The unexpected move sees president Clay Magouyrk and Mike Silica share the CEO role, a major shift at a key time for the cloud giant, which recently signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI.

Riding the AI boom, Oracle's shares are up 85% this year alone, helped by a stunning set of quarterly results earlier this month that included $455 billion in sales that haven’t yet been counted as revenue.

Those results helped briefly make its co-founder Larry Ellison the richest person in the world.

Given that, it's no surprise that the leadership shakeup appears focused primarily on driving its AI strategy.

Magouyrk previously served as president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company's platform for data centers. Meanwhile, Silica was previously the president for Oracle Industries, which has recently rolled out AI agents for healthcare, banking, and a host of other key sectors targeted by the hyperscaler.

"Humanity is investing enormous resources in the race to advance Artificial Intelligence," said Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison. "Clay's years of experience leading Oracle's large, fast-growing Cloud Infrastructure business has demonstrated his readiness for a CEO role.”.

"Mike has spent the last several years modernizing Oracle's Industry applications businesses – including Oracle Health – by completely rebuilding those applications using the latest AI technologies."

In a joint statement, the new CEOs said they were "excited to lead Oracle into the AI era." While the role is shared, their pay differs: Magouyrk has been handed a stock deal worth $250 million, with Silica handed a stock package worth $100 million.

Catz set to stay on the Oracle board

Catz has led the company since 2015, becoming co-CEO with Mark Hurd after Ellison stepped aside in 2014, and staying solo after Hurd passed away in 2019.

Catz has long been seen as one of the most successful women in technology, and was one of the highest paid CEOs in the US, earning $138 million in 2022, according to CNBC.

The former chief exec isn't departing completely. Instead, she will start a role as executive vice chair of Oracle's board of directors. In a statement announcing the move, Catz said the shakeup comes at the “right moment to pass the role to the next generation of capable executives”.

"Safra led Oracle as we became a hyperscale cloud powerhouse—clearly demonstrated by our recent results," Ellison said in a statement.

"In her role as Vice Chair, Safra and I will be able to continue our 26-year partnership — helping to guide Oracle's direction, growth and success."

A smooth transition

While few would have seen this shakeup coming, disruption isn't expected, according to analysts.

"Investors are already familiar with both Mr. Magouryk and Mr. Sicilia and that their promotions solidify the importance of the Cloud and Industry businesses as the growth levers for the company," Evercore ISI analysts said in a note according to Reuters.

"The bottom line is that with Larry remaining at CTO and Safra as Executive Vice Chair, we expect a smooth transition in the near-term."

"We think the move expands the breadth of leadership at Oracle, with Larry and Safra still providing guidance and business discipline," Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler wrote in a note to clients on Monday, according to Morningstar.

Others attempted to guess how the co-CEOs would job-share. "The bottom line is that with Larry remaining at CTO and Safra as executive vice chair, we expect a smooth transition in the near-term," Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne said in a note to clients, as reported by Morningstar.

"Our expectation is that Mike will focus on many of the sales initiatives, especially around apps/industry verticals, with Clay in charge of OCI/database."

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Oracle has secured a $300 billion contract with OpenAI to underpin the company’s surging compute requirements, marking the latest big win for the hyperscaler.

According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, the contract is set to commence in 2027 and will see Oracle expand the underlying infrastructure required to power OpenAI models.

This marks the latest in a string of deals struck by OpenAI to support future expansion as the firm scrambles to match skyrocketing power demands.

Compute power has been frequently identified as a key bottleneck for the company as it ramps up AI development.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s long-term partner and financial backer, has been a key player in supporting the firm through its Azure cloud computing service. But with reports of strained relations between Microsoft and OpenAI gaining traction in recent months, the latter has been looking elsewhere for industry support.

In June 2024, a deal between Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI was announced to provide the latter with “additional capacity”. At the time, the company said this was to support “inference and other needs”.

Notably, the deal marked a huge shift away from Microsoft, which until that point had been OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.

Similarly, earlier this year OpenAI and Oracle agreed to partner on the Stargate Project, a $500 billion initiative aimed at building out AI infrastructure across the United States.

Oracle is capitalizing on AI

Oracle is fast emerging as one of the big winners from the increasingly frantic generative AI race.

In its most recent earnings report, the company revealed it added upwards of £317 billion in future contract revenue, with OpenAI responsible for a huge chunk of this.

Shares surged following the earnings report and Larry Ellison’s personal wealth skyrocketed.

Elsewhere, the company has made significant gains in areas such as multi-cloud, again driven by surging AI demands. Enterprises globally are shifting to a hybrid or multi-cloud approach as a result of the generative AI race, and it’s a trend that Oracle has been keen to capitalize on.

At the Oracle CloudWorld Tour London conference in March this year, the hyperscaler announced an expansion of its multi-cloud relationship with Azure.

This followed confirmation of a similar partnership with AWS at its annual conference in Las Vegas just months prior.

High stakes for OpenAI

OpenAI’s blossoming relationship with Oracle doesn’t come without risk, however.

As sources told the WSJ, this is a deal that “far outstrips” the company’s current revenue, which is reported to stand at around $10 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI will essentially owe Oracle an average of $60 billion a year.

The deal also rests heavily on whether OpenAI’s current growth trajectory continues as it looks to draw more customers across both the enterprise and consumer markets.

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• Oracle layoffs loom despite strong financial results
• Oracle’s European investment drive continues in Germany and the Netherlands

Oracle is slashing even more jobs despite positive earnings results, with staff across key locations earmarked for redundancy.

Last month, Oracle reportedly cut hundreds of jobs in its cloud unit amid wider headcount reductions across the US, Canada, and India. Those cuts appear to be continuing into September, though Oracle has yet to confirm the redundancies.

The fresh round of layoffs appears to be in the hundreds of jobs, with 100 in Washington and 250 in California — confirmed via mandated WARN notices.

Further cuts have been reported at the cloud computing giant’s health division in Missouri, although a Reddit thread including employees who have been let go suggests the job cuts are impacting staff well beyond those two states.

Roles impacted are believed to include cloud operations managers, analysts, user experience staff, and also software engineers.

Separate discussions on a layoffs website suggest there have been cuts in India and that the total figure is well beyond 400 now, with the layoffs expected to continue this month and next.

As with the first round of job cuts in August, the roles affected appear to be across the business rather than Centred in any one department. Oracle also made cuts last year.

ITPro approached Oracle for clarification on the layoffs, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

Oracle layoffs come in wake of positive results

The decision to cut staff may come as a surprise given Oracle recently reported positive financial results. The company’s recent earnings call showed it posted an 8% increase in full-year revenue, surpassing $57.4 billion.

Oracle is also playing a key role in the multi-billion dollar Stargate project alongside OpenAI, with whom it recently signed a landmark $30 billion contract. Oracle’s share price has risen 45% over the last six months alone.

The hyperscaler isn’t alone in issuing cuts in the wake of positive financial results, however.

Last week, Cisco said hundreds of jobs were on the line, with the bulk of those in software engineering.

That also followed an 8% jump in revenue for the company's fourth quarter, posting $14.7 billion in sales. Last year, Cisco slashed 6,000 employees, some 7% of its overall workforce, to increase investment in "high-growth areas".

Delivering fourth quarter results, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said: "The AI infrastructure orders we received from webscale customers in fiscal 2025 were more than double our original target, indicating a massive opportunity ahead as we lead the required architectural shift and build the critical infrastructure needed for the AI era."

Microsoft also cut 300 jobs in Washington earlier this summer, again with software engineers apparently the focus of the redundancies.

In a statement at the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said it continues to "implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace."

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Oracle has announced plans to invest $3 billion in Germany and the Netherlands as the cloud computing giant continues its European infrastructure push.

Over the next five years, the firm will invest $2 billion to expand its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) footprint in Germany, with a big increase in AI infrastructure capacity in the Oracle Cloud Frankfurt region in particular.

In a statement outlining the plans, Thorsten Herrmann, senior vice president and Germany country leader at Oracle, said the move is aimed at helping organizations across the country “accelerate their AI and cloud journeys”.

“In addition, we’re supporting the federal government’s objective of strengthening Germany as a hub for AI investment and innovation in Europe,” Herrmann added.

The investment will also help Oracle meet demand for sovereign cloud and AI services in the German public sector and other industries, including the manufacturing, automotive, renewable energy, scientific research, and healthcare sectors.

As part of the move, Oracle confirmed startups and investors across Germany will be given access to infrastructure for AI training and inference, as well as multi-cloud options.

"We are pleased about increasing investments, both from Germany and internationally, and expressly welcome this investment," said Karsten Wildberger, federal minister for digital transformation and government modernization.

"It strengthens our digital infrastructure and enables companies and public authorities to benefit from state-of-the-art AI and cloud technologies."

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Oracle is planning to invest $1 billion over the same timespan to meet growing demand for AI and cloud services. This will see the company significantly expand AI infrastructure capacity in the Oracle Cloud Amsterdam region.

The plan is to target organizations in key local industries such as financial services, logistics, life sciences, and energy.

Oracle is all in on European expansion

These latest investment announcements come amid a big push across the region, which the hyperscaler views as a market ripe with opportunities.

Earlier this year, Oracle unveiled plans to invest $5 billion in the UK, significantly expanding its OCI footprint across the country.

A similar $1 billion investment in Spain last year was also announced, with a keen focus on supporting the country’s financial services sector.

Larry Ellison, CTO and chairman of Oracle, has been highly vocal about Oracle's plans across Europe in recent years, identifying it as a key market for the company amidst the growing demand for sovereign cloud services.

Speaking last year, Ellison said he expects every country to have its own sovereign cloud setup, noting at the time that the company was in negotiations with a number of national governments.

Enterprise appetite for sovereign cloud options has surged across Europe, largely in response to stringent regulatory requirements on data protection.

Speaking to ITPro last year, senior Forrester analyst said sovereign cloud options are now the “bare minimum” expected from customers in the region - and providers have pivoted hard to expand options on this front.

Alongside Oracle, a host of industry competitors including Google, Microsoft, and AWS have been rushing to launch their own sovereign cloud services.

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OpenAI has emerged as the company behind a $30 billion cloud deal with Oracle following several days of speculation.

According to reports from Bloomberg, the landmark deal will see OpenAI rent 4.5GW of capacity from Oracle in an expansion to the Project Stargate scheme.

Stargate is a joint venture backed by the US government to build out AI data center capacity across the United States, as well as other international locations.

Unveiled in January, the scheme includes support from SoftBank and aims to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years.

As part of the recently-confirmed deal, Oracle will take the lead on the development of a series of data centers across the country, Bloomberg noted.

This will include an extension to the company’s existing data center campus in Abilene, Texas, taking the site from 1.2GW to 2GW.

Separate reports from the Financial Times also point to development projects in a raft of other states, with Michigan, Wyoming, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all touted as possible locations.

OpenAI confirmation follows days of speculation

The reports bring to a close several days of speculation over a mystery customer Oracle had secured.

Earlier this week, the cloud computing giant revealed it had signed a landmark deal worth $30 billion in annual revenue, commencing from 2028 onward - yet the customer in question wasn’t named.

The announcement from Oracle, detailed in its Q4 2025 earnings statement, sparked conflicting reports, with some touting OpenAI alongside social media giant TikTok.

“Oracle is off to a strong start in fiscal year 2026,” said CEO Safra Catz in an SEC filing on Monday.

“Our multi-cloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100 percent, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in fiscal year 2028.”

For context, $30 billion in annual revenue for the firm’s database segment is double the current size of its cloud business, which stood at $24.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year.

Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle, fueled further speculation during an earnings call where he said the customer “could be in Europe, could be in Asia”.

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CISA has issued a warning over the risk of data breaches following a security incident affecting legacy Oracle cloud environments, urging enterprises to shore up defences.

In an advisory published Wednesday 16th April, the security agency said the incident “presents a potential risk to organizations and individuals” despite unconfirmed reports on the scale of the breach.

CISA specifically highlighted risks for enterprises where credentials “may be exposed, reused across separate, unaffiliated systems, or embedded (i.e., hardcoded into scripts, applications, infrastructure templates, or automation tools)”.

“When credential material is embedded, it is difficult to discover and can enable long-term unauthorized access if exposed,” the agency added.

The advisory from CISA follows confirmation by Oracle that a threat actor leaked credentials sourced from what it referred to as “two obsolete servers” earlier this year.

In an email to affected customers, the cloud computing giant insisted the incident was limited to these impacted servers and not connected to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or specific customer cloud environments.

“Oracle would like to state unequivocally that the Oracle Cloud - also known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI - has NOT experienced a security breach”, the email read.

“No OCI customer environment has been penetrated,” it added. “No OCI customer data has been viewed or stolen. No OCI service has been interrupted or compromised in any way”.

How to shore up defenses after the Oracle incident

In its advisory, CISA also offered guidance to help enterprises mitigate any risk associated with the credential leak.

The agency urged organisations to reset passwords for affected users across the entirety of their network, adding that additional caution should be taken where credentials “may not be federated through enterprise identity solutions”.

Similarly, security personnel were advised to review source code, infrastructure as code templates, automation script, and configuration files for hardcoded or embedded credentials. These should be replaced with secure authentication methods, the agency insisted.

Further guidance included:

• Monitoring authentication logs for “anomalous activity, especially involving privileged, service, or federated identity accounts”.
• Assess if additional credentials - including API keys and shared accounts - might be associated with affected identities.
• Implement phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all user and admin accounts “where technically feasible”.

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A war of words has erupted between Oracle and cybersecurity researchers following claims the company suffered a security breach.

In mid-March, a threat actor by the name ‘rose87168’ published six million records, claiming the data was stolen from Oracle’s Cloud federated Single Sign-On (SSO) login service and demanding payment from affected customers.

Posted to the dark web, the sample database allegedly included a list of affected companies, encrypted SSO passwords, Java KeyStore (JKS) files, LDAP information, and more.

“The SSO passwords are encrypted, they can be decrypted with the available files, also LDAP hashed passwords can be cracked,” the threat actor said.

"I'll list the domains of all the companies in this leak. Companies can pay a specific amount to remove their employees' information from the list before it's sold."

Initial analysis from researchers at CloudSEK suggested the root cause of the breach appears to have been a failure to patch a server affected by a critical vulnerability.

“The threat actor has demonstrated sophisticated capabilities by targeting a critical authentication infrastructure,” CloudSEK said in its report. “They’re not only selling the data but also actively recruiting assistance to decrypt the stolen passwords, suggesting an organized and persistent threat operation.”

Oracle hits back at data breach claims

Oracle strongly denied the claims by both the threat actor and CloudSEK, insisting no customers have been impacted.

“There has been no breach of Oracle Cloud,” a spokesperson for the firm told BleepingComputer. “The published credentials are not for Oracle Cloud. No Oracle Cloud customer experienced a breach or lost any data.”

Researchers at CloudSEK have hit back, however, publishing a follow-up report which claims their investigation “paints a different picture”.

CloudSEK said the threat actor provided a sample of customer data and a text file created on login.us2.oraclecloud.com – which researchers said equates to “evidence aligning with their claim that the SSO server was active weeks before the breach surfaced”.

In a comprehensive rebuttal to Oracle’s claims, CloudSEK said its investigation centers around a series of key findings.

This includes the fact that an archived GitHub repository from Oracle’s official “oracle-quickstart” account features a script (mpapihelper.py) using login.us2.oraclecloud.com for OAuth2 token generation.

“This endpoint authenticated API requests for the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, proving its production use,” researchers said. “OneLogin and Rainfocus documentation further validate its role in live SSO setups.”

Similarly, the security firm pointed to what it described as “real users’ exposure” as a sign the claims are legitimate. A host of domains found in public GitHub repositories and Oracle partner guides allegedly match the attacker’s leaked tenant list, CloudSEK noted.

“These are not dummy accounts but Oracle Cloud users, underscoring the breach’s scope.”

Rahul Sasi, CEO and co-founder of CloudSEK, said the firm is “driven by transparency and evidence, not speculation” in response to Oracle’s denial.

“This follow-up report equips the community and Oracle with facts to investigate and mitigate this threat responsibly.”

The potential impact of the Oracle breach

CloudSEK said the alleged breach could have profound implications for Oracle and its customers.

The company said six million records, including sensitive authentication data, could be at risk, thereby resulting in “heightened risks of authorized access and espionage”.

The risk posed by encrypted SSO and LDAP passwords could also “unlock further breaches if cracked,” CloudSEK warned.

Similarly, the supply chain fallout of the incident as a result of exposed JKS files is a serious cause for concern, enabling downstream attacks on interconnected systems.

“A suspected unpatched vulnerability suggests deeper security flaws,” CloudSEK added.

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In recent months there’s been a big push on agentic AI in the tech industry, in particular with regard to ‘do-it-yourself (DIY)’ platforms that give businesses the tools to design their own agents.

Just this week, Oracle launched its ‘AI Agent Studio’ that embeds agentic tooling within the Oracle Fusion Platform, allowing customers to both create and manage agents or teams of agents across enterprise platforms.

OpenAI dropped a new set of tools and APIs earlier in the month that serves a similar purpose, allowing users to build agent logic and orchestration processes for agents to complete tasks.

Other firms such as AWS, Salesforce, and Workday have released their own platforms, all with a focus on giving users the tooling to make agents rather than simply providing off-the-shelf agents for businesses to use.

The reason that the emphasis is being placed on user customization and direction speaks to the use cases of agentic AI, which according to Gartner analyst Pieter J. den Hamer are often less deterministic or pre-defined than with other technologies.

“You need to tailor them,” Hamer told ITPro. “You need to customize them to the business context at hand.”

That may be why AI vendors are ramping up offerings in this regard, Hamer noted, as they know that end-users will get the most use out of agentic tools if they have full control over how they work, and what they do. It’s all in their hands.

Agentic AI in the hands of the enterprise

With the onus on the end-user, this raises questions over how these platforms will compete when they all offer similar tooling and the end result is largely dependent on implementation.

From an enterprise perspective, this also presents a conundrum over which platform to choose.

Ultimately, businesses need to pay attention to the nuances of different agentic platforms and assess whether the controls they provide align with their needs in terms of management, security, and scale.

Ease of development will be a key differentiator, according to Hamer, and there will be differences in whether agents can be created via low-code or no-code processes, or whether more complex engineering is required.

Integration with other tools and workflows - or with other agents - will also be a deciding factor, he added, as well as the flexibility or openness of the framework that the agents are running on.

If the technology is being targeted at staff as a means of letting them create agents for their own personal tasks, for example, then ease of use and configuration capabilities also become more important.

“I think importantly it's also the financial costs that also need to be monitored,” Hamer added, referencing the potential for vendors to charge users on a pay-per-use basis.

“If you have 10 agents that may be okay, but if, you know, if you're successful you get hundreds or 1000s of agents, then this cost may quickly spiral out of control,” Hamer said.

The ideal agent platform should also be able to integrate with agents from different vendors or origins in Hamer’s opinion, as customers may eventually want to, for example, make their Workday agents collaborate with their Salesforce agents.

With this in mind, as the agentic AI space matures in years to come, its development may mirror that of the broader cloud computing space, which initially started as a rush to the public cloud, but more recently has evolved to a point where many enterprises adopt a multi-cloud approach.

The risk of agent sprawl

While agents bring with them great possibilities in terms of driving efficiency and productivity, there is potential for them to create problems, particularly when businesses get to the stage of mass deployment.

Businesses could find themselves facing ‘agent sprawl’, whereby different staff members and teams are using multiple agents that may be siloed or not configured to communicate correctly with one another.

There may be hundreds of different models operating on different devices, according to Forrester analyst Craig Le Clair, meaning the importance of proper governance becomes more vital.

“Keeping the number of platforms to a minimum, having them be approved by corporate IT - that's really a critical governance function that we find,” Le Clair told ITPro.

If proper housekeeping isn’t done on the agentic front through the removal of excess tooling, then businesses may find themselves facing sprawl issues, Hamer said.

“If you do nothing then your agent ecosystem will quickly become an agent jungle,” Hamer added.

The prospect of agent sprawl mirrors a trend already witnessed in the broader enterprise space in recent years, with firms across a range of industries reporting problems with tool or application sprawl.

Many had already developed oversized software ecosystems before AI came along, and research shows this can have a huge impact on both efficiency and security.

Red Canary’s 2024 Security Operations Trends report last year showed many businesses were contending with heightened costs as a result of tool sprawl, for example.

Discussing the looming prospect of agent sprawl with ITPro, Oracle’s VP of AI business value Neil Sholay made similar comments about the issue and the need for proper agentic management.

“My personal view is we are very quickly going to move to a world where you have agents coming from multiple vendors,” Sholay said.

“I think we need to very quickly start looking at things like portability, reuse, and some kind of standard framework for how you have agent-to-agent interoperability,” he added.

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Oracle’s latest foray into the world of AI agents will leverage the firm’s strength in infrastructure and come at no additional cost to users, the company revealed at Oracle CloudWorld Tour London 2025.

‘AI Agent Studio’ will bring agentic capabilities to the Oracle Fusion platform, giving users the ability to create, deploy, and manage agents across cloud infrastructure.

The aim is to drive productivity by making it easier for Oracle customers to automate tasks using agentic technology, which is a form of AI that can be configured to complete entire business processes.

Speaking to ITPro, Oracle’s VP of AI business value, Neil Sholay, said a big differentiator of the platform is the fact that it comes at no additional cost to the end user.

Another key appeal, Sholay said, is that Oracle has a “complete platform” that this tool integrates with.

“Everything runs in one technology stack - so you have one development environment, one operating model, one commercial model, and that gives you huge benefits in terms of efficiency,” he said.

“What it also means is, if something is improved lower down the stack - say we've got some new Nvidia GPUs - everything benefits,” he added.

Miranda Nash, group VP of Oracle AI, made similar comments about the differentiation of Oracle’s agent studio as part of a press event ahead of CloudWorld Tour London.

Nash said the tool is included within users’ cloud subscriptions and that the platform is closely tied to the data that is already in Fusion. This, she said, helps leverage the existing capabilities of Fusion.

“It's really well suited when the center of gravity of what you're doing is Fusion Applications,” Nash said.

“The power of Fusion, of course, is that we've got a shared data model, which means this agent has access to those shared objects across HR, finance, front office, you know, supply chain - across basically the entire enterprise,” she added.

The agent market is getting crowded

Differentiation will become increasingly important as firms roll out competing agentic capabilities and platforms. In just the last few months, several big names in tech have put their hats in the ring.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released a set of tools and APIs designed to simplify the deployment of agentic AI, as well as new search tools and integrated observability tools to monitor how agents perform.

AWS announced an expansion of its existing Amazon Bedrock Agents towards the end of 2024, giving users access to tools for agent building, deployment, and orchestration.

Other names making moves in the agent space include Workday and Salesforce, both of which give users an ability to deploy agents within enterprise environments.

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Oracle is still focused heavily on driving multi-cloud adoption, doubling down on a message that came out of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas a few months ago.

As part of Oracle CloudWorld Tour London 2025, the firm announced an expansion of its multi-cloud relationship with Azure, which includes the availability of ‘Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure on Oracle Database@Azure.’

This expansion will remove the need to provision dedicated database and storage servers, giving customers greater access to the benefits of Oracle Exadata Database Service.

Speaking at the event, Rajagopal Subramaniyan, SVP of OCI networking, covered some of the firm’s broader, strategic commitments to the multi-cloud landscape.

“Until now, the industry has lacked a deliberate multi-cloud solution. This has increased customers' complexity when it comes to moving data - the operational complexity and cost is extremely troublesome for customers,” Subramaniyan said.

“Today, we are giving you the ability, the flexibility to keep your existing cloud infrastructure investments while leveraging Oracle's Database Cloud Services natively to run your operation workloads,” he added.

He asked the audience to think of this as a transition from a ‘walled garden’ approach to a ‘network of clouds’ approach that allows for more flexibility.

“Multi-cloud is the connective tissue that unites your existing clouds into one,” Subramaniyan said.

“You can maximize the value of each of your cloud investments, enabling them to come together. A multi-cloud eliminates the reliance on a single cloud provider. This means you have the flexibility now to run your workloads with the hyperscalers of your choice,” he added.

Jason Rees, SVP of technology and cloud infrastructure for Oracle EMEA, echoed a similar sentiment when speaking at a press briefing during the event, noting that the tech giant is intent on breaking down barriers for customers.

“Oracle has really led the way on this concept of choice, of multi-cloud, and what we recognized was the need for, rather than the industry creating walled gardens, we wanted to better break those down to make it easier,” Rees said.

Oracle is all in on multi-cloud

Multi-cloud partnerships were the rallying cry of the firm’s last big event in the US, with CTO Larry Ellison calling it “the beginning of the multi-cloud era” and talking up the firm’s mission of giving customers choice.

A key factor in this sharpened focus on multi-cloud lies in the benefits of this approach amidst the generative AI boom. Fostering closer collaborative ties with major industry counterparts will ultimately drive adoption of the technology and deliver benefits for enterprise customers.

“You – our customers – are what brings this all together for us,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, driving home the customer-centric aim.

The event’s biggest announcement was a new tie-up with AWS that allows customers to use Oracle’s database services in AWS environments and plug data from Oracle environments into AWS applications.

“Many of our long time rivals are now our partners … Microsoft, then Google, and now AWS,” Catz said.

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Oracle is set to invest $5 billion (£3.85 billion) to ramp up support for the UK’s cloud infrastructure capabilities, the firm has revealed.

In an announcement confirming the move, the tech giant said the funding will be distributed over the next five years and go towards expanding the footprint of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in the country.

It will also help support the UK’s plans to adopt and innovate with AI, Oracle said, enabling more organizations in the region to leverage Oracle’s AI and cloud computing services.

This includes sovereign AI capabilities, as well as multi-cloud capabilities and generative AI tools.

Oracle said it's committed to increasing the presence of OCI in both public and private sector organizations in the UK, including in industries like healthcare, financial services, defense, retail, and manufacturing.

Through this investment, UK organizations will be able to access Oracle’s various cloud regions as well as take advantage of the latest innovations in AI, such as AI agents.

Peter Kyle, secretary of state for science, innovation, and technology, commented on the investment, calling it a testament to the country’s growing strength in the AI sector.

“This $5 billion investment will accelerate our AI ambitions, providing businesses and public services with cutting-edge cloud infrastructure to drive productivity, enhance security, and unlock new opportunities for growth – driving forward our Plan for Change,” Kyle said.

“By working with global tech leaders like Oracle, we’re cementing the UK’s position at the forefront of the AI revolution, creating high-skilled jobs, fueling innovation, and securing our place as a world-leading tech powerhouse," he added.

Siobhan Wilson, SVP of Oracle UK, said the funding cements Oracle’s commitment to the UK’s technology ambitions.

“Our cloud investment will help ensure that customers can use AI to achieve new levels of productivity, unlock growth, and benefit from superior performance and security, all with improved cost savings,” Wilson said.

Oracle continues regional focus

Oracle has announced similar investments into other regions over the last year or so, signaling the firm's interest in regional cloud infrastructure.

In June 2024, for example, Oracle committed $1 billion to Spain as part of a bid to support the region's industries through improved cloud infrastructure.

The firm has also been vocal on sovereign cloud offerings, having unveiled its plans for a European region in 2023.

Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison more recently said that he expects every region to have its own dedicated sovereign cloud region in the coming years.

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The US government has announced $500 billion in funding as part of a huge drive to expand AI infrastructure capabilities across the country.

The ‘Stargate Project’ is a new company, backed by industry heavyweights including SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX as initial equity funders.

SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI taking operational responsibility. Softbank's Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.

Meanwhile, Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners for the project.

The move marks one of the first major tech announcements from the new Trump administration.

"We're announcing the largest AI infrastructure project in history, and it's all taking place right here in America. As you know there's great competition for AI and other things," said President Trump.

"We want to keep it in this country. China's a competitor and others are competitors - we want it to be in this country, and we're making it available."

OpenAI said developments are already underway, starting in Texas with a one-million-square foot data center.

The firm is also evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as it puts the finishing touches on definitive agreements. There's expected to be an initial five sites, and eventually as many as 20.

"We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately," OpenAI pledged in a blog post.

"This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world."

Oracle, Nvidia, and OpenAI will work closely together to construct and operate the system, building on a collaboration between OpenAI and Nvidia going back to 2016, as well as a more recent partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.

Meanwhile, OpenAI already partners with Microsoft, and says it will continue to increase its use of Azure.

Trump said he would act to help streamline the planning and construction process.

"I'm going to help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built," he said.

"They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we'll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily, at their own plants if they want, where at the AI plant they'll build energy generation."

Infrastructure expansion hopes tempered by energy concerns

While the infrastructure project has been welcomed by some industry stakeholders, others have raised concerns over the potential environmental impact.

In a LinkedIn post, Mark Nelson of Radiant Energy Group pointed out that the Stargate Project will require an enormous amount of power - and money - to run.

"Each center will want at least 6GW of firm capacity available, minimum, at all times," he said.

"I expect total power costs to run, very roughly, at $4 billion per year per Stargate, or about $100 per MWh. For reference, Microsoft is paying a bit more than $100 per MWh to get 17% of one Stargate's-worth from restarting Three Mile Island."

AI-related energy consumption has become a recurring talking point in the last two years amidst the rise of generative AI.

In particular, the strain placed on energy infrastructure has raised serious concerns, with research by Schneider Electric in December 2024 highlighting the long-term impact on regional grids.

Similar research on this topic found data centers currently consume 4.4% of American energy, and this is set to triple to 12% by 2028.

The study, conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, predicted power demands for data centers will increase to between 325TWh and 580TWh in the next four years.

IBM has announced plans to acquire global Oracle consultancy Applications Software Technology in an effort to bolster its Oracle expertise.

Applications Software Technology specializes in driving business transformation with Oracle Cloud Applications, particularly for clients in the public sector such as local government and education.

IBM said the deal will enhance its Oracle solutions for clients across North America, the UK, and Ireland, helping them deal with issues such as transitioning legacy systems, the scarcity of skills, or security and compliance requirements.

The agreement builds on IBM's acquisition of Accelalpha, a global provider of Oracle Cloud Applications consulting across advisory, implementation, and managed services, in September last year.

"Public sector clients’ cloud transformations often require a consulting partner with industry, domain and technology expertise," said Kelly Chambliss, senior vice president, IBM Consulting, Americas.

"The acquisition of Applications Software Technology will boost IBM’s public sector and Oracle Cloud Application skills to help clients confidently navigate their business transformations."

Applications Software Technology has been an Oracle partner since 1996, providing Oracle solutions in areas such as business process redesign and Oracle Cloud deployment.

Headquartered in Lisle, Illinois, the company has teams across the US, UK, Canada, and India. Its past acquisitions include Symatrix, 9EDGE, and Computer Technology Resources.

It's currently a portfolio company of funds managed by Recognize Partners; after the IBM deal is closed it will join IBM Consulting.

Along with its public sector presence, Applications Software Technology also serves commercial clients in the manufacturing, energy and consumer packaged goods industries.

It partners with Salesforce and MuleSoft, with its consultants working across the Oracle Cloud Applications Suite, particularly around Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Management (ERP).

"We are excited to join IBM and open up new opportunities for our people and expand transformative solutions to deliver business outcomes for our customers," said CEO Justin Winter.

"Applications Software Technology and IBM have complementary capabilities, client relationships, service offerings and values around our people, innovation and commitment to client success. Together, we will continue to grow in the market for cloud transformation solutions."

The deal, for undisclosed terms, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2025, pending customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Current chair and chief technology officer (CTO) Larry Ellison alongside Bob Miner and Ed Oates launched Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later Relational Software, in 1977 in Santa Clara, California. 

Renamed Oracle in 1982, today the firm is increasingly known for portfolio expansion through the acquisition of firms like Siebel Systems, Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, and NetSuite.

Oracle boasts 160,000 employees and revenues of $53 billion, up 6% versus fiscal 2023. Cloud services are the Austin, Texas, firm's biggest earner; adding in license support revenues, surging 12% to $39.4 billion for full-year 2024. 

Leah Yomtovian, senior vice president, partner and operations strategy, presides over at least 20,000 partners worldwide, including Shi International, CDW, Infosys, Accenture, LTI Mindtree, and Version 1.

Key offerings

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) targets control, flexibility, compliance, and modernization opportunities, including AI and multi-cloud services for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. This portfolio includes Oracle and open-source databases as well as analytics and business intelligence (BI).

Oracle Cloud Applications with embedded AI help manage processes across business functions including Fusion Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management, Fusion Cloud human capital management (HCM) or customer experience (CX). Oracle NetSuite ERP, Java, and on-prem offerings also sit under this umbrella.

Oracle Cloud Applications with embedded AI help manage processes across business functions including Fusion Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management, Fusion Cloud human capital management (HCM) or customer experience (CX). Oracle NetSuite ERP, Java, and on-prem offerings also sit under this umbrella.

Recent news:

• At CloudWorld in September 2024, Ellison revealed a partnership embedding Oracle databases into AWS systems for multi-cloud use cases.
• May 2024 saw an Oracle Database 23ai update with AI Vector Search for using conceptual content to find docum
• In July 2024, Azul Systems argued that many Java users are migrating to OpenJDK alternatives like itself, partly as a response to Oracle pricing per user changes announced in January 2023.

Oracle for partners

Enterprise cloud, multi-cloud, enterprise applications, and AI all represent expanding opportunities with Oracle. As of September, Oracle had 162 cloud business-supporting data centers in operation and under construction with the largest containing "acres" of NVIDIA GPU Clusters for training large-scale AI models. 

"Our database business growth rate is increasing as a result of our multi-cloud agreements with Microsoft and Google," Ellison said. "Our recently signed AWS contract [means] customers [can] use the latest Oracle database technology from within every hyperscaler’s cloud."

Similarly, according to Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, of mission-critical database technologies, Oracle Database 23ai's AI Vector Search makes it simpler for devs and data professionals to build intelligent apps, boost productivity, and run critical workloads; multiple Oracle solutions target business functions equally relevant to internal channel requirement.

Why partners matter

Its complex and diverse business-focused portfolio makes the channel instrumental to the adoption and implementation of OCI and Oracle cloud applications. "Partners have always been key to our success as they help our customers leverage the power of the suite to increase efficiency, drive productivity, and ultimately do more with less,"  Oracle brand NetSuite noted in April. 

"With such a critical role to play, they act as an extension to our team and the results of that collaboration speak for themselves."

Revenue funneled through EMEA partners leaped 45% in Oracle's first half from June 2023, versus the equivalent 2022 timeframe. That success also helped partners grow their practice faster, winning more business, the vendor added.  

Yomtovian confirms that partners have been critical to Oracle for over 40 years, with automation operations a key focus.

"We see more opportunities to collaborate, creating differentiation that no one can match, helping our customers select the right solutions for their needs, leveraging technology to achieve more with less, and continuously improving and innovating with ongoing updates," she adds.

“As a result of our close collaboration with partners, we expand our reach and bring in more customers.”

Partner programs, tiers, and partner types

OPN offers certifications, customer feedback, and support for Principal (headquarter entity) and Associate (subsidiary) solutions and services, with Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond tiers, tracks, and enablers. 

Enablers include offers such as dedicated SaaS demo instances for Cloud Build, Cloud Service, and Industry Healthcare tracks. There's also a Cloud Sell track, and a License and Hardware track for partners that build, service, or sell with Oracle software licenses or hardware products.

However, a newly enhanced OPN was mid-launch in December with Level 3 partners being enrolled and Levels 1 and 2 following in March 2025.

Enhanced OPN benefits will cover the following:

Level 1

• Five seats for advanced delivery and success training on the Oracle portfolio.
• Enabler for dev/test environments.

Level 2

• 100 seats for advanced delivery and success training on all Oracle products.
• 125,000 partner credits for use on added benefits.
• Managed regional GTM collaboration.

Level 3

• 500 seats for advanced delivery and success training on the Oracle portfolio.
• 750,000 partner credits for use on added benefits.
• Managed global GTM collaboration.

All levels receive:

• Sales readiness training.
• Foundational delivery and success training.
• Foundational marketing resources and activities.
• Proof-of-concept (POC) funding for qualified opportunities.
• Sales assets.
• OCI pre-sales support.
• Joint account planning and selling.
• Oracle Marketplace listing.
• Integration qualification.
• Foundational success resources.

Added benefits unlocked with partner credits

• Training and enablement - advanced delivery and success training.
• GTM collaboration - advanced marketing resources and activities.
• Technical accelerators - Dev/test environments, integration validation, solution architect, and migration services.
• "Success support" via partner success or technical account managers.

Further benefits, rewards, and incentives

Partners not seeking OPN membership can become Remarketers, reselling 1-Click mid-market products and Oracle's database appliance through distribution without a contract or fees.  

However, members receive:

• A discount on Oracle University Education. Programs include the Cloud Excellence Implementer program, as well as multiple learning pathways and certifications.
• Partner pricing on Oracle University Cloud Learning subscriptions.
• Community access and other member assistance.
• Use of Oracle partner logo.
• Oracle Partner Finder listing.
• The global Oracle PartnerNetwork Solutions Catalog of partner solutions and services.
• Application listing on Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
• A chance to exhibit at Oracle CloudWorld.
• Regular communications from Oracle Alliances & Channels.
• Support and suggestions are also available on the portal; via local OPN interaction center reps or local phone and email details on the 'Contact Us' tab. Alternatively, use the Oracle Partner Assistance form.

How to get on board

Partners can enroll in OPN by completing an application. Technology product providers and ISVs should start with the ISV Go To Market Interest Form for confirmation regarding product, application, and GTM objectives. 

Otherwise, consult this guide, then start with the Oracle Partner Journey Builder for questions and recommendations, after which they can complete OPN enrolment. Partnering decision-makers need an Oracle account with a company-specific email address. 

Acceptance is subject to approval and receipt of full payment - membership costs $500 and selected tracks $3000 each, plus taxes, in 2024.

Meta wants help from nuclear energy developers to power its data centers for AI, saying it needs up to four gigawatts of supply to meet surging demands.

The move comes amid a drive by big tech firms to find new sources of energy, as AI models increasingly grow in size and require more and more power.

The 4GW Meta says it may require is enough to power four million homes by some counts. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle have all begun developing nuclear power partnerships.

Meta said the drive to accelerate AI innovation — and other advanced technologies that will "build the future of human connection" — will require new electric grids along with new sources of reliable, clean energy. To help achieve that with nuclear power, Meta announced a request for proposals to help find potential partners.

"Supporting the development of clean energy must continue to be a priority as electric grids expand to accommodate growing energy needs," the company said in a blog post.

"At Meta, we believe nuclear energy will play a pivotal role in the transition to a cleaner, more reliable, and diversified electric grid."

The announcement comes amid plans to build a $10 billion AI focused data center in Louisiana, which will be powered in part through renewable energy.

Why Meta needs nuclear partners

Meta noted that nuclear projects are more challenging to support than solar or wind, as they're more expensive, take longer to develop, and have tighter regulatory requirements.

"These differences mean we need to engage nuclear energy projects earlier in their development lifecycle and consider their operational requirements when designing a contract.," the company said in the blog post.

"And, as scaling deployments of nuclear technology offers the best chance of rapidly reducing cost, engaging with a partner across projects and locations will allow us to ensure that we can deploy strategically."

Those challenges are why the company is using the request for proposals process to find partners. The aim is to have between one and four gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity by the early 2030s. The project will be delivered in the US.

Big tech is all in on nuclear

Meta isn’t the only big tech company turning to nuclear power to meet the growing demands of AI. As AI models get bigger and bigger — required to boost the accuracy of large language models — they require more energy to train and run.

In October, Google signed a deal for seven modular reactors from Kairos Power that will generate 500MW of power, beginning in 2030.

Amazon is trying to convince regulators to allow it to build a $650 million data centre next to a 2.5GW nuclear station in Pennsylvania, while Microsoft has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation for nuclear energy partially sourced from Three Mile Island.

Oracle said in September it had building permits for three modular reactors. CEO Larry Ellison said at the time that the company had 162 data centers live and under construction, with the largest drawing 800 megawatts.

“That's what's required to stay competitive in the race to build one - just one - of the most powerful artificial neural networks in the world,” Ellison said.

SAP has announced new sovereign cloud capabilities in the UK, meaning customers will now be able to process data entirely within the borders of the country.

The offering is now fully operational and available to customers, SAP said in a statement, and is designed to meet the highest standards of data residency, security, and compliance within the UK.

It’s targeted specifically at public sector organizations, critical national infrastructure such as utility firms, and any other highly regulated industries. SAP said it’s particularly relevant for organizations in aerospace, defense, government, and energy or natural resources.

The offering includes a range of SAP products, including SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, SAP SuccessFactors HCM, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, and others.

This move builds on SAP’s initial investment into the UK in 2021, the firm said, and aligns with growing customer demand for sovereign cloud services that ensure security and compliance.

“In today’s complex global environment, it is vital for our customers to understand that their data, as well as our solutions and services, are secure,” Leila Romane, managing director, SAP UK & Ireland, said.

“These are managed by security-cleared personnel in dedicated, local, secure facilities. Sovereignty is essential in protecting against unlawful data access, ensuring compliance, and mitigating risk,” she added.

SAP jumps on the sovereign cloud bandwagon

SAP is the latest in a string of businesses to announce sovereign cloud offerings as customers in the UK and Europe flock to data residency options. Analysts previously told ITPro that sovereign capabilities are now the “bare minimum” for cloud providers.

Oracle has been pushing particularly hard on this front, unveiling a dedicated sovereign cloud region in Europe in 2023 and talking up demand for sovereign cloud more recently at Oracle CloudWorld 2024.

Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison even went so far as to predict that most international governments will want a sovereign cloud region, with Oracle well placed to serve that demand.

Other firms have been rolling out services in this domain as well. Rackspace unveiled a sovereign cloud service targeting UK public sector customers earlier this year, for example, while Scottish cloud provider DataVita and HPE announced a dedicated sovereign cloud service for UK customers in August.

Similarly, Microsoft rolled out data residency plans in Europe at the start of this year, with one tech analyst telling ITPro that the move had been a “long time coming.”

The demand for sovereign cloud has to do largely with regulatory compliance in Europe. Data on a sovereign cloud must reside entirely within the borders of a region, and so its risk of being accessed by another region is reduced massively.

This is an attractive feature for certain businesses, particularly public sector ones and those in critical infrastructure, as it ensures that potentially sensitive or high-risk data is protected from external access.

Some data processing regulations also demand that data be processed in-region, with EU regulators in particular focusing heavily on these requirements.

The UK's data center industry could grow tenfold by 2035, according to new analysis from techUK, but only if the government takes action on energy supply and planning reforms.

A new report from the trade body found data centers are already contributing £4.7 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) annually to the UK economy, £640 million in tax revenue, and supporting 43,500 jobs across the UK economy.

If the UK can boost data center supply to more than its recent growth rate, which stands between 10-15% per year, this could bring in an extra £44 billion in GVA between 2025 and 2035 from the construction and operation of data centers, along with a tax boost of an additional £9.7 billion.

Employment opportunities could also surge, the study found, with 40,200 additional jobs directly employed in data center operational roles and an extra 18,200 additional jobs in data center construction roles.

"Data centers are the backbone of the digital economy; without them our transport, energy and wider economy couldn’t function. And with continued AI advances, the importance of data centers to unlocking tech-led growth is only accelerating," said Matthew Evans, TechUK's director for markets.

"Despite the critical role data centers play in supporting sustainable economic growth, their potential is far from fully realized. With the right policy support and collaboration between industry and government, the sector is poised to drive further innovation and enable digital transformation across all sectors of the economy across the country."

Increased government support to drive infrastructural improvements will be required to meet these goals, however. The report noted that investment is needed to improve grid connections and enable access to renewable energy sources through schemes such as power purchase agreements (PPAs).

TechUK also called for the development of on-site renewable energy sources such as geothermal or small modular reactors (SMRs), to help ensure long-term sustainability.

The use of SMRs in data center operations has become a recurring talking point in recent months as power demands skyrocket. Oracle CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison revealed the company is exploring the possibility of embedding these smaller reactors within data centers to increase power capacity.

The UK’s planning system also needs reform, according to TechUK, with the trade group calling for the introduction of a National Policy Statement for data centers, streamlined planning processes through the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) regime, and improved training for local planning authorities to ensure consistent decision-making.

"This government has already begun to give a boost to the sector by giving them Critical National Infrastructure status which will strengthen protections against events like cyber attacks," said technology secretary Peter Kyle.

"As these findings show, if government and industry work together to tackle the challenges and harness the opportunities the sector offers, we can create thousands of jobs and drive prosperity across all corners of the country. We have already seen the sector respond with over £25 billion of private investment committed in recent months."

Data center growth could be stunted by energy constraints

The report from techUK comes as researchers warn that data center demands could exceed the world’s global renewable electricity supply by as early as next year.

A study from Loughborough University said growing data consumption rates globally could surpass the total volume of electricity production by 2033.

"Our research underlines the need for a data-centric sustainability approach across all supply chains, sectors, industries, and nations,” said Loughborough Business School academic Dr Vitor Castro.

“Such measures are crucial to increase efficiency, cut energy usage, and transition towards a decarbonized digital ecosystem, thereby supporting the global pursuit of a sustainable, net-zero future.

"This isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a societal imperative. We must shift from consumption-driven growth to sustainable practices that align digital advancements with ecological limits.”

Data center power consumption has become a hot topic across the global tech sector, with industry stakeholders and researchers warning that the energy demands placed on infrastructure by generative AI and cloud services is becoming untenable.

A study earlier this year found data center operators in Europe are struggling to meet demands, while a host of major industry players - such as Microsoft and Google - have recorded surging greenhouse gas emissions as a result.

This has prompted some companies to explore alternative energy sources to contend with growing demands - and nuclear energy in particular has been earmarked as a key focus.

In September, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with energy provider Constellation to power data centers with nuclear energy.

The partnership will utilize ‘Unit 1’ of the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania, where a partial nuclear meltdown in ‘Unit 2’ took place over 40 years ago.

Last month, Google announced a partnership with Kairos Energy that will see the firm use SMRs to power its data centers by the end of the decade. The agreement will see 500MW of power supplied to the tech giant, with the first of SMRs due to come online by 2030.

Data center energy demands in Europe are set to triple by the end of the decade, and that means countries will need to boost investment in sustainable power sources and upgrade grid infrastructure.

That's according to a report from consultancy McKinsey, which said the rise of AI is driving this demand, with the power needed to fuel European data centers set to grow from 62 terawatt-hours (TWh) today to more than 150 TWh by the end of the decade and from 10 gigawatts today to 35GW by 2030.

This pan-European surge is echoed by research suggesting US data center power consumption will double over the same timeframe.

The rise of AI has led to higher demands for data centers and energy to power them, with one report suggesting the spike in energy use from generative AI alone will produce 2.5 billion tons of carbon through 2030.

A host of major tech companies have also reported skyrocketing energy consumption this year, including Google, which recently admitted its emissions leapt by almost half over the last five years, led by booming demand for AI.

That AI-driven leap will see data center power consumption growing from two percent of Europe's total energy demand to 5% in the next six years, McKinsey reported. To meet that demand, as much as $300 billion will need to be invested into data center infrastructure — and that doesn't include power generation.

But developing sufficient power to meet that AI-fueled demand may not be simple, McKinsey noted. While data center providers are keen to use largely green energy, there are hurdles around reliability of power sources, land availability, insufficient infrastructure to access power, and a lack of equipment and skilled tradespeople.

"In large, established markets such as Dublin and Frankfurt, the time required to supply power to new data centers can exceed three to five years, with lead times for electrical equipment alone often surpassing three years," McKinsey noted in a post.

No easy solution to meeting data center power demands

Cracking this problem could help Europe meet looming demand for AI, while also helping to meet demand for electricity amid the rise in electric vehicles, domestic heat pumps, and manufacturing shifts to more sustainable sources of energy.

That said, McKinsey predicts data centers alone will make up as much as a quarter of new energy demand by 2030.

A key factor in this surging demand is the hardware underpinning AI development globally, which requires top-end GPUs that are typically power hungry. That's led to calls for more data centers, in particular those designed with the right hardware optimized for AI training and workloads.

McKinsey predicts that hyperscalers will drive growth in data centers, making up 65% of data center demand by 2028, with much of the rest made up by enterprises.

Driving green energy — and new grid designs

Data center providers tend to require green energy sources, which in turn enables companies such as Meta and Google to attempt to meet net zero goals.

"In the last two decades, no technology has driven the need for accelerated power infrastructure development in Europe more than AI, and particularly generative AI," McKinsey said. "What’s more, this demand is mostly for clean energy."

But it's not as simple as building a data center in countries with a carbon-free electricity supply — such as the Nordics — as it depends on the stage of AI. During development, location matters less than when AI is being used and latency comes into play.

"Currently, many new data centers are designed for AI training, which has less stringent latency requirements than traditional data center activity," McKinsey said.

"Over time, some of these may shift to AI inferencing, which demands much higher speeds than AI training or traditional use; those in remote locations with poor latency may not be suitable for this."

On-site power is an appealing option

Another concern is grids, which in some regions are reaching capacity limits and have slow lead times for new connections, with equipment constraints delaying such work by up to two years.

Earlier this year, the CEO of the UK’s National Grid warned that rising power demands will continue placing significant pressure on grid capacity across the country.

Speaking at the Aurora Spring Forum in Oxford, John Pettigrew said the energy operator predicts a six-fold spike in demand from commercial data centers in the next decade alone.

Because of this, data centers may need to invest in their own energy sources on site beyond renewables like solar panels, including hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas and even small modular nuclear reactors.

Google recently announced a partnership with Kairos Power for the latter while Oracle CTO Larry Ellison revealed the cloud computing giant is exploring the possibility of developing its own small modular reactors (SMRs) to power data centers directly.

While countries may balk at investing billions of euros into upgrading power systems just for generative AI, McKinsey noted that such efforts will help build a "more resilient and sustainable energy future" alongside letting Europe ride the wave of AI.

Microsoft has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with energy provider Constellation in a move that will power data centers with nuclear energy.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will buy energy from a newly reopened plant as part of its wider goal to match the power use of its data centers in Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland (PJM) with carbon-free energy.

The partnership will utilize ‘Unit 1’ of the ‘Three Mile Island’ site in Pennsylvania, where a partial nuclear meltdown in ‘Unit 2’ took place over 40 years ago.

According to Constellation, Unit 1 is a “fully independent” facility and was not impacted by the accident.

Significant investment will be made to restore the plant and its equipment, the two companies confirmed, which is eventually set to create 3,400 new jobs and add over 800 megawatts (MW) of carbon-free electricity to the surrounding grid.

Before Unit 1 was retired on economic grounds in 2019, the plant was capable of generating 837 MW of electricity, or enough to power over 800,000 average homes. By its final year of operation, the plant was at maximum capacity output for 96.3% of the time, well above the industry average.

“Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” said Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez.

Microsoft’s VP of energy, Bobby Hollis, echoed this sentiment, describing the partnership as a significant step in the firm’s efforts to decarbonize the grid and push toward carbon negativity.

The plant will be renamed Crane Clean Energy Center (CCEC), in honor of former Constellation CEO Chris Crane who passed away in April. The facility is expected to be online by 2028.

Microsoft isn't the only hyperscaler eyeing nuclear energy 

Microsoft isn’t the only firm sizing up the nuclear option to power its data centers. Most of the other major cloud providers have announced similar initiatives over the past few months as carbon emissions skyrocket.

Though it hit a roadblock in July, AWS announced plans in May to invest $650 million in a data center adjacent to a 2.5 gigawatt nuclear power station also located in Pennsylvania.

Oracle has revealed similar goals in this regard, albeit not at the same scale. The firm recently announced plans to power a new 1GW data center through the use of small modular reactors (SMRs).

Though Google has yet to announce any formal plans, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Nikkei that he was considering how the firm might utilize nuclear power.

Google has also been looking at other energy sources such as solar and geothermal in a bid to drive down emissions and push towards carbon-free energy production.

Oracle is set to power a new data center with upwards of 1 gigawatt (GW) capacity through nuclear energy, according to the firm’s CTO Larry Ellison.

Speaking during a recent earnings call, Ellison confirmed the cloud computing giant has “already got building permits” for three nuclear reactors - small modular reactors (SMRs) to be precise, which are theoretically cheaper to run owing to their size.

“This is how crazy it's getting. This is what's going on,” Ellison raved in response to an analyst question about the market’s move from AI training to AI inferencing.

Oracle’s nuclear plans form at least part of the firm’s forward-looking vision, with Ellison talking up the company’s huge data center portfolio and the accelerating power capacity of each site.

The firm has 162 data centers live and under construction across the globe, Ellison said, with the largest of these sites commanding 800 megawatts (MW) in power consumption and “acres” of Nvidia GPU clusters for AI development.

“That's what's required to stay competitive in the race to build one - just one - of the most powerful artificial neural networks in the world,” Ellison said.

“The stakes are high and the race goes on. Soon Oracle will begin construction of data centers that are more than a gigawatt,” he added, referring to the nuclear-powered data center.

Ellison also talked up some of the firm’s recent announcements at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, which saw the firm push towards the “multi-cloud era” via partnerships with AWS and Google Cloud.

Oracle is the latest to tap into nuclear

With data center power demands skyrocketing, nuclear power has become an attractive option for companies hoping to source larger amounts of energy whilst minimizing carbon emissions.

In April this year, for example, AWS announced plans to spend $650 million on a data center location situated next to the Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, capable of producing 2.5 GW.

A few months ago this move hit a snag, however, after several electricity providers hit out at the project over potential price hikes for taxpayers or problems with grid availability in the area.

More recently, Constellation Energy announced that it would be partnering up with Microsoft to reopen the infamous ‘Three Mile Island’ nuclear plant, over 40 years after one of the reactors suffered a partial meltdown.

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison took a strong stand on cybersecurity at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, calling passwords a “terrible idea” in need of replacement with biometric security measures.

“The idea that we use passwords is a ridiculous idea. It's obsolete. It's very dangerous,” Ellison said during his keynote at the company’s flagship event in Las Vegas.

“They are 17 characters long - including special characters that no one can ever remember and has to write down - are unbelievably easy to steal,” he added.

He even went as far as to detail Oracle’s commitment to banishing passwords internally in the not-too-distant future - “by this time next year, Oracle employees won't be using passwords, and a lot of you will have the choice to not use passwords anymore.”

The alternative? Biometric security measures such as facial or thumbprint recognition capabilities that Ellison feels are far more secure and less susceptible to exploitation from malicious actors.

“Biometric logins are much easier to use - and much faster and much more secure,” Ellison claimed.

“You point your smartphone to your face for a couple of seconds, you put your fingerprint on the smartphone, you can record your voice if you want to - and we register it in a biometric database,” he added.

Ellison pointed to other areas in which biometric technology could be used to enhance security, such as with credit cards or in schools to ensure that people cannot gain unauthorized access to physical sites.

“It becomes very difficult to impersonate somebody else if you have proper user authentication,” Ellison said.

Biometric technology isn’t fault-proof

Ellison's enthusiasm aside, there are cybersecurity concerns surrounding biometric technologies, with events in recent years pointing to issues with harvesting vast amounts of personal data.

In 2020, for example, Clearview AI was hacked, raising concerns about malicious actors gaining access to the facial recognition technology provider’s large stores of images. In this case, the hackers only gained access to the firm’s client list, but the damage could have been worse.

Any company gathering facial recognition data should therefore be careful, as their systems could become attractive targets for cyber criminals seeking to access personally identifiable information (PII).

The technology isn’t perfect, either. In 2018, civil liberties group Big Brother Watch reported that facial recognition technology misidentified people as criminals at a failure rate of 98% when used by police in the UK.

There is also growing concern around deepfakes as technology is used to create fake video and audio files of real people, now increasingly via generative AI.

Companies looking to adopt voice recognition technology as a replacement for passwords, for example, would need to think long and hard about this, as there is potential for cyber criminals to imitate the voices of employees to gain access.

In February this year, a finance worker at a major firm in Hong Kong fell prey to threat actors using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a conference call.

The unsuspecting worker was duped into paying out $25 million.

The demand for sovereign cloud capabilities is “truly global” according to a senior figure at Oracle, and the company intends to fully capitalize on this trend in the year ahead.

Speaking to ITPro at a roundtable at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, Scott Twaddle, SVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), product and industries, described the burgeoning sovereign cloud computing market as “fascinating” in its scope, going on to detail the range of areas in which it's gaining traction.

In New Zealand, for example, one of Oracle’s partners is working to build out a sovereign cloud that is “able to better serve the government” via existing relationships and ownership structures.

“We’re also seeing huge demand in the Middle East, we’re seeing it in Japan, we’re seeing it in Europe as well,” Twaddle said.

“I can’t really think of an area of the world where we’re not seeing interest here, and where we don’t already have customers in active conversations,” he added.

The only differentiating factor is the “actual deployment model” used within these regions. Twaddle said they are even seeing demand in some of the smallest or least populated countries across the globe, though he was not at liberty to specify which ones.

The Oracle exec's comments come just months after the firm’s co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison made similar points about the popularity of sovereign cloud to attendees during an earnings call.

Ellison claimed that “pretty much every government” will likely want their own sovereign cloud and dedicated region in the coming years, noting also that Oracle is well placed to fulfill that demand.

He said at the time that the firm had a “number of countries” they were negotiating with to establish sovereign clouds within regions.

The CTO touched again on this topic during his 2024 CloudWorld keynote, stating that countries are “very concerned that their data remains sovereign - they want their data in their country.”

“We can build those countries' sovereign clouds,” Ellison said, mentioning Serbia and Thailand by way of example.

“We built … these sovereign clouds, where they can keep all their government applications in a dedicated private cloud where there’s only government applications,” Ellison said.

Oracle has a leading edge in cloud sovereignty

The firm’s cloud is uniquely geared for sovereignty, according to CIO Jae Evans, who also noted the great demand Oracle is seeing for sovereign clouds across the globe as more nations look to maintain control of their data.

Evans told ITPro there are “quite a few nation states” exploring how to maintain robust data sovereignty standards within their geographical region while also ensuring data is directly managed by people within those regions from an operational perspective.

“We're able to do that because of the way we built our cloud,” Evans said at a CloudWorld Q&A session.

Oracle has the advantage of being able to start from a “small footprint,” she added, as opposed to the “mega cloud” offerings of other providers which have hundreds and hundreds of racks.

“A lot of these nation states, they don't want to be in the public cloud,” she said. “We’re able to provide the same set of resources - same set of features, same set of functions - in a smaller footprint.”

“That then enables us to be able to deploy these smaller regions and provide the operation capabilities from a sovereignty perspective in the respective countries or geographic borders,” she added.

Oracle isn’t alone in its sovereign cloud strategy, with a number of other major providers also ramping up investment in this area. In May, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled plans to launch its own dedicated sovereign cloud offering in Europe as part of a €7.8 billion investment.

The hyperscaler plans to roll out the AWS European Sovereign Cloud between now and 2040, and will see the firm develop sovereign cloud infrastructure in the German state of Brandenburg.

Oracle has announced a new partnership with AWS at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, forming part of the firm's wider mission to bolster multi-cloud environments across the enterprise.

The new offering will allow customers to use Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS environments, providing a connected experience across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AWS.

Similarly, customers will be able to plug data from their Oracle environments into applications running on specific AWS services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon Bedrock.

Oracle’s rallying cry around this announcement has been one of ‘cloud unity’, with other announcements from the firm falling into a similar vein of multi-cloud adoption for its customers.

For example, it also announced the general availability of Oracle Database@Google Cloud in four regions across the US and Europe. This will allow customers to run various Oracle services on OCI in Google Cloud datacenters.

“Many of our long time rivals are now our partners … Microsoft, then Google and now AWS,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said at her opening keynote for the flagship event in Las Vegas.

“We build our technology so that you - our customers - can run it anywhere you want,” she added, doubling down on the general theme of openness which was a constant throughout the first day keynotes.

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison championed a similar message in his keynote speech later in the day, lamenting the fact that many clouds “really don’t work well together” in the current enterprise landscape.

Ellison noted many customers desired interoperability between AWS and Oracle.

Given this seemed “such a good idea,” Oracle moved to establish the partnership, and Ellison went on to formally announce the agreement later in his talk with AWS CEO Matt Garman on stage.

Oracle is building on a sense of interoperability that it’s been working on for some time with these announcements. The Oracle Database@Azure service received a huge update earlier this year, for example, bringing connectivity with Microsoft’s cloud platform to a further five regions globally.

Oracle eyes a practical approach to multi-cloud

While this latest partnership with AWS is largely a continuation of Oracle’s “existing multi-cloud efforts”, according to Gartner analyst Sid Nag, it’s still important to commend the firm on its move towards multi-cloud.

“Any cloud provider that is sort of raising their hand and saying, ‘I'm committed to multi cloud’, and actually doing something about it, gives them … the position of being a thought leader, so I think it’s good,” Nag told ITPro on the ground at CloudWorld.

He also noted the importance of Oracle’s practical approach to multi-cloud.

This approach is, in Nag’s words, a “desired architectural model … I have complex workloads and applications for which my primary cloud provider cannot provide all the capabilities and services, so I lean into a secondary or third tertiary cloud provider.”

This is the desired intent of multi-cloud, Nag added, but the difficult part is the instrumentation of that process. Nag referred to this as “cross-cloud integration framework” - a term used by Gartner and one which accurately describes what Oracle is doing.

“What they're actually doing is not only committing themselves to the multi cloud capability, but it's actually making it real by implementing a cross cloud integration framework,” Nag said.

Oracle’s move towards multi-cloud positions it well in the wider tech landscape, with many providers and end-users increasingly turning to this approach to deliver cost benefits, increased flexibility, and security.

Welcome to ITPro’s live coverage of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 for day two of the event.

We've got more keynotes ahead of us today - to kick us off we'll hear from EVP of Oracle Applications Development, Steve Miranda.

His keynote is entitled 'Discover the Power of Oracle AI in Oracle Fusion Applications,' so expect to hear about all Oracle can offer in its Oracle Fusion Applications department. 

While we wait for everything to kick off, why not check out this piece for a steer on what to expect today:

Oracle can do for AI what it did for cloud – and CloudWorld 2024 is its chance to show that

The firm has taken a no-nonsense approach to AI over the last few months, and Oracle CloudWorld may well see an extension of that rhetoric. Ditching the generative AI hype has been key for the firm and is what makes Oracle stand out in the current goldrush. 

The venue is impressive at this years event, with brand logos located all around the keynote halls and meeting rooms.

We're making our way over to the keynote now, along with the rest of the media and analyst attendees. 

It’s filling up in the keynote hall, which is even bigger than the one for SuiteWorld yesterday. 

There’s still some time to kill - why not check out a bit more of our coverage here: 

Oracle bets on vector search capabilities to drive enterprise AI value

Oracle is betting big that every country will soon have its own sovereign cloud

The keynote stage is all set up and ready for Catz's address to begin. 

And we’re off! As is often the case, today’s keynote begins with an impressive promotional video that spans all the screens across the length of the keynote hall (which is a lot). Following that, Catz hits the stage, welcoming the applauding crowds.

“You  - our customers - are what brings this all together for us,” Catz says, likely hinting at the theme for today's keynote. Oracle builds technology for customers to run it anywhere they want, Catz adds.

She’ll be showcasing Oracle’s “partnership with you” in today’s keynote, referring of course to the many hundreds of customers and partners here in attendance today.

Without much waiting around, Catz introduces the first customer - MGM Resorts International. Bill Hornbuckle, CEO of the firm, takes to the stage to chat with Catz about their story with Oracle. 

Amusingly, MGM is a big name right here on the Las Vegas strip, where all the attendees of CloudWorld are staying. Hornbuckle talks about the change that’s happened in Vegas and the hospitality industry as a whole before getting into the more technical aspects of the business. 

“Because of our scale, it is about technology,” Hornbuckle says. Tech plays an important role in improving the experience of customers, such as digital concierge or digital check-in features. 

Now Hornbuckle moves on to the important part - its use of Oracle. The firm uses Fusion, for example, which has helped to reduce labor and streamline financial processes, among other things. 

And how does AI fit in, Catz asks? Hornbuckle says the “ultimate vision” for AI at MGM is to learn about customers, making experiences more customizable and tailored to individuals. 

Next up, La’Naia Jones, CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This customer is particularly special to Oracle, Catz says, as the CIA was Oracle's first-ever customer. 

Jones talks about needing to use data to “augment” the CIA's intelligence, looking to create insights that could help the CIAs global aims. Cyber security is predictably a big topic for the CIA, as well. 

The CIA is also looking into AI. This could help with looking at vast amounts of data, for example. Delivering capabilities like this to a group such as the CIA can be difficult, but Catz maintains that these sorts of customers teach Oracle a great deal.  

There’s no time to rest - Catz now gets Bernard Gavgani and Jean-Yves Fillion onto the stage, CIO and CEO of bank BNP Paribas. Like the CIA, it’s another firm that deals with sensitive data that needs strong security, helping to further cement the sense of Oracle as a trusted cloud vendor. 

Gavgani talks about technology as the heart of BNP Paribas. They want to provide the best solution to their customers by gathering databases into “one single area” unified under a single form of management.

They want to do this within their “own premises,” and Oracle has taken its time to understand this aim from BNP Paribas and to ensure that it was achieved - Gavgani even pauses to thank Catz directly for this. 

Cloudflare is next on the billing, with Catz welcoming Co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn to the stage as the representative. Security and resilience are core to Cloudflare’s offerings, according to Zatlyn. 

“It’s not getting safer out there,” Catz says, referring to the cyber security landscape. But why OCI, she asks? Zatlyn responds, commending the innovative nature of Oracle in a dynamic, ever-changing world. She also likes that Oracle is “priced for performance.”

Keeping on top of different clouds - including different workloads in different environments - is made simpler via Oracle. Though it can be difficult in terms of complexity, Oracle works well in these sorts of multi-cloud environments, according to Katlyn. 

Entel is next. Antonio Büchi group CEO is called up to chat with Catz about the firm’s move to the cloud, and he begins by outlining Entel’s role and aims within the wider industry. 

The keynote is running slightly over time and some attendees are exiting the hall - but Catz and Büchi continue to chat, discussing the importance of ensuring customer satisfaction. 

Customer success is crucial here, as it has been throughout this keynote - the more successful Oracle’s customers are, the more successful Oracle itself is. That seems to be what Catz is hammering home in today's opening talk.  

It looks like it’s time to wrap up this morning's keynote - Catz recaps some of the keynote's key takeaways before thanking the audience. As she leaves the stage, the crowds get out of their seats to leave the main hall. 

There’s a break now, until 1 PM (PDT) this afternoon when Larry Ellison will be taking to the stage to go through more announcements, as well as the firm’s vision and strategy. Make sure to tune back in for more updates!

We’re back! The crowds are filing in to hear CTO Larry Ellison deliver his keynote, ‘Oracle Vision and Strategy.’

Expect details on all of Oracle’s latest announcements at this keynote as Ellison takes to the stage to talk about what the company’s been up to. 

We’re almost ready to go as the last of the crowds take their seats in the main hall. 

After another action-packed promo video, Ellison hits the stage and he gets straight to the point. The first topic he’ll be covering will revolve around multi-cloud before he moves on to talking about AI and cloud security. 

“The clouds are becoming open - they’re no longer walled gardens,” he says, in reference to multicloud. 

He then talks about cloud security, in a world where ransomware attacks are on the rise. Ellison thinks AI will help the industry here, and Oracle is reportedly deploying the technology to bolster security. 

However, clouds don’t work well enough together, Ellison says. Some customers want to move Oracle Exadata databases and applications to AWS, for example - there needs to be multi-cloud capabilities to make that happen.

Connecting clouds can prove complex, as well. Network interconnections can be tricky and speed can be an issue. The better approach would be to embed an Oracle database within AWS, he adds. 

Ellison grabs himself a chair before continuing on to reveal the first announcement - a new partnership with AWS that embeds Oracle databases with AWS systems to aid multi-cloud use cases. 

Now he invites Matt Garman, AWS CEO, up on stage to go into more detail about the announcement.

“It’s what customers have asked for for a very long time,” Ellison says, as the pair chat about the demand that’s existed for an Oracle, AWS partnership. 

Now the pair invite another guest, Andy Zitney, CTO at Slate Street. Zitney represents an Oracle customer that’s set to benefit from the new AWS integration. Zitney expects to be operating out of around 43 data centers globally as the firm needs to be functioning almost everywhere. 

Now we’re back with just Ellison who carries on talking about multi-cloud generally. Ellison talks about how OCI data centers now exist within the big three major cloud providers - AWS, Google, Microsoft. 

They are also building data centers within Fujitsu, NTT, and NRI, Ellison adds. Oracle is set on driving multi-cloud - and positioning itself as the most committed proponent of this sort of cloud operation. 

“Our private cloud is absolutely identical to our public cloud,” Ellison goes on, introducing another aspect of the Oracle offering. Oracle is famed for its private cloud offerings, often turned to as a cloud provider by companies with more sensitive data. 

Now for the next topic - AI and cloud security. Ellison wants to ask how AI can be utilized to “dramatically” improve cloud security. 

“Passwords are a terrible idea,” he says - they are difficult to remember, easy to steal. As such, Ellison thinks there must be more options out there for ensuring security in the enterprise. 

He goes briefly over some of the core tenets of security - data security, application security, user identity, and network security - before going into each one in more detail. 

Human error is the big issue here, Ellison thinks. With automation, security can be made much stronger by removing the potential for users to make mistakes in, for example, configurations.

Now for application security - specifically, the talking point here is code generation. With Oracle’s application code generator, APEX, security comes front and center. “It will not generate a vulnerability,” Ellison says. 

Remember Ellison doesn’t like passwords? Que the next topic, biometric authentication. Computers are entirely able to be integrated with biometric authentication, such as via facial recognition or fingertip recognition via the keyboard. 

“Biometric logins are much easier to use … and much more secure,” Ellison claims. He maintains that it is very difficult to hack into systems that are protected biometrically.  

Now for network security. This is an incredibly complex area, Ellison says, as it needs to be incredibly high-performance but also highly secure. 

Within OCI, Oracle has been able to integrate Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR) to help advance network security and ensure that the complexities of network security are made more manageable.

“The Oracle cloud network is isolated from the public internet,” Ellison says, yet further ensuring a level of network security within Oracle. 

Combining biometric identity with this “new generation” of ZPR can “stop most serious cyber attacks,” Ellison says.

And with that, Oracle’s day-one keynotes are over! Make sure to tune back in at 9 AM (PDT) tomorrow to catch the next keynote from EVP of Oracle Applications Development, Steve Miranda. 

While we wait for the keynote to kick off, why not check out some of our recent coverage of the event: 

‘Many of our long-time rivals are now our partners’: Why Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud

Oracle has made plenty of announcements so far, including a deal with AWS that will see the firm look to support multi-cloud adoption. 

The crowds are flooding in to hear Steve Miranda’s talk, focused this morning on AI. 

Oracle is starting things off with another promo video, this time centered around Oracle AI in Oracle Fusion. Following that, Steve Miranda hits the stage to loud applause from the gathered audience.

He goes over the “complete suite” of Oracle’s AI solutions, all built on a unified technology stack. The firm's AI apps and analytic tools run on this stack, which ensures speed and security for customers.

Miranda then pulls up a video demo to talk through, in which Oracle’s AI tool is embedded into an employee process in Salesforce.   

Like Catz in her opening keynote, Miranda is also going to address some of the customers achieving success with Fusion Applications. In fact, he’s even going to get one up right now - Caesar’s Palace from just over the road in Las Vegas. 

Stephanie Lepori, CAAO of Caesars, is repping the firm on stage. She talks about how the business environment has changed at the hotel-casino, which in recent times has bought betting company William Hill.  

But why did it choose Oracle? Lepori says that the firm quickly saw the benefit of having a single platform to operate on, particularly with regard to financials. 

Miranda also asks about how Caesars is using or thinking about AI, to which Lepori responds that the firm wants to “utilize the toolkits” available to help drive customer experience and general operations. 

“Oracle has been a great partner,” Lepori adds, looking towards the firm’s future on the platform as Miranda wraps up his chat with her. 

The next section is titled ‘Innovation that Matters,’ in which Miranda will continue to expand on the potential of Oracle’s AI solutions.

“We do not charge you extra for AI,” Miranda says emphatically, explaining that the technology is embedded in Oracle products for the sole purpose of benefitting customer use cases. 

He adds that Oracle uses Oracle AI within its internal operations, such as reconciling banking transactions, speeding up supply chain planning cycles, or assisting in recruitment processes.  

Now for another demo, in which an employee sends a receipt written in another language to one of Oracle’s AI agents, which can then read and understand it. 

“It doesn’t matter what the document is,” Miranda says - you can give it to the AI agent and it can parse it and upload it, meaning users can then share or work on the documents within the Oracle platform. 

Time for another customer now - Dietrich Franz, the CFO from DHL will be talking to Miranda about the firm’s user of Oracle. He goes over how he and Miranda met, at a previous Oracle event. 

Franz then talks about DHL’s implementation of cloud technology and the improvements it’s seen in the business. In HR, for example, DHL is using a lot of self-service features to drive value. 

After Franz leaves the stage, Miranda moves on to talking about Oracle’s supply chain solutions. The firm’s ‘Smart Operations’ offering, for example, can assist customers in managing manufacturing, maintenance, and inventory.

Following this, another customer, Zebra, joins Miranda on stage. Matt Ausman, CIO at the firm, sits down with the Oracle exec to chat. 

Ausman said the firm has been able to focus on making cost savings which it can then pass on to customers. Zebra is focused on ensuring they get things to customers when they need them. 

Apparently a prerequisite of coming on stage, Ausman is also asked about the firm’s use of AI. 

Miranda now moves on to the final demo of this mornings opening talk. He showcases a conversation with one of Oracle’s AI chatbots which has access to user context that can ensure answers are contextualised.

If you’re concerned about the accuracy of responses, fear not - Miranda shows off the fact that all AI responses come with links to sources so that users can check up on how answers were returned. 

And that brings us to the end of this morning's keynote - tune back in at 11 AM (PDT) today for Oracle CloudWorld’s next talk titled ‘Oracle Cloud: AI, Speed, Flexibility, and Security Your Way.’

We’re back! The keynote hall seems a little quieter for this session but there are still plenty of attendees filing in. 

This will be our last session of live coverage from the event, but be sure to keep an eye on ITPro for more pieces focused on CloudWorld. You can also check out our other coverage from this event and the colocated SuiteWorld event:

‘Many of our long-time rivals are now our partners’: Why Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud

NetSuite expands AI to enhance performance management, analytics offerings

SuiteWorld 2024 live: All the news and updates as they happen

Here comes Clay Magouyrk, EVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Development, following - you guessed it - another introductory video, this time featuring a snappy montage of business leaders (presumably all Oracle customers) commenting on their industry. 

After promising to get everyone out in time for lunch, he begins to wax lyrical about shipping containers. He notes how efficiency and cost-effectivenes has been achieved in the shipping container industry over the years.  

This had a knock on effect, changing everything from factory layout to road design, he says. The transformation was spread out across industries and different areas. 

The relevance for Oracle? If you can understand what a “truly transformed” industry looks like, then you can understand what it will mean to truly transform the cloud industry, Magouyrk says. 

He adds that Oracle is “continuing to push forward” in this cloud transformation journey. He mentions another industry now, the animation industry, explaining that animators need the cloud everywhere. 

With that, it's time for a customer, Skydance Studio. SVP Gregory Brentin takes to the stage to what is certainly the loudest cheers we’ve heard all conference (there seems to be a few Skydance fans in the audience).

“We need to make technology invisible to our artists,” Brentin says - the animators need to have a seamless experience that allows them to create without distractions of digital systems. 

Skydance renders some of its projects in OCI, and Brentin even has an example to show off from a new film (which goes down very well with the audience). Brentin says the firm is looking to create a studio positioned entirely within the cloud eventually. 

Magouyrk now unveils Dedicated Region25, a physical server product offering that customers can now buy off the shelf to install and create their own cloud regions. 

This allows for ease and flexibility, with customers able to position their servers anywhere (rather than having to be side by side) as well as being able to customize their power usage among other things.

Magouyrk now refers back to multi-cloud, a big theme from yesterday's keynotes and a key aspect of some of the firm’s big announcements - see below for more detail:

‘Many of our long-time rivals are now our partners’: Why Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud

To explore this topic a bit more, Magouyrk invites Google Cloud’s Amit Zavery to the stage. As you can read about above, Oracle has been building on its partnership with Google Cloud to provide more multi-cloud capability. 

“The partnership so far has been incredible,” Magouyrk says before the pair wrap up their chat about all things Oracle and Google Cloud. 

Magouyrk hands the entire stage over to Uber’s Kamran Zargahi now, who opens by talking about the firm’s partnership with OCI and the extent to which Oracle helps Uber deliver its services. 

“OCI provides a lot of great features to us,” he says, explaining how Oracle has made the impossible possible for Uber. It’s a short and sweet presentation and Zargahi off the stage fairly quickly. 

After letting the crowds know that the talk is still on time to get everyone out for lunch, Magouyrk spends a bit of time talking about OCI superclusters and GPU cooling hardware. Magouyrk demos some of the functionality of the AI platform Grok, which runs on OCI and some of these clusters.  

After a few closing statements, Magouyrk’s keynote is over - and so is ITPro’s live coverage of Oracle CloudWorld 2024. There’s still plenty to talk about though, so keep an eye out for more coverage over the next few days. 

Welcome to ITPro’s live coverage of Oracle SuiteWorld 2024 from Las Vegas, Nevada. 

Held in parallel to Oracle CloudWorld 2024, we've got a packed agenda for both conferences over the next few days, starting with the opening SuiteWorld keynote at Caesar's Forum at 3pm today. 

NetSuite’s Executive Vice President Evan Goldberg will open proceedings this afternoon, giving us a run down of all the latest news and announcements at the company. 

The theme for the keynote is 'All Systems Grow' and will focus on looking at “fresh strategies” to fuel growth, including information on NetSuite’s AI capabilities straight from the experts who helped design them.

While we wait, why not check out some of our other recent NetSuite coverage: 

NetSuite doubles down on localized AI with UK, EMEA product launches

The firm introduced new features to address ESG reporting problems and surface more data insights for EMEA customers. A suite-wide generative AI tool was also unveiled, so expect today’s keynote to talk about the technology some more.

Netsuite also talked up generative AI at its last SuiteWorld conference which you can read up on here: 

NetSuite's approach to AI is unlike any other, but will its customers follow?

Like its owner, Oracle, Netsuite feels like it’s well-placed to deliver quality generative AI tools that are integrated right into the platform. 

Today’s NetSuite keynote is taking place at Caesar’s Palace, a hotel and casino well known on the strip. 

We’re heading over to the media and analyst lounge now, ahead of the keynote. 

At last years SuiteWorld, NetSuite unveiled a cross platform generative AI tool for producing context-driven anywhere on the platform. This works for creating emails, product documentation, or reports. Have a more in depth read of our coverage about this tool here: 

SuiteWorld 2023: NetSuite unveils new cross-platform generative AI tools

It’s time to head over, via golf cart of all things! 

It’s already getting busy as attendees gather to hear Goldberg’s address to the audience. 

The stage is quite the spectacle! 

The screen has been getting gradually greener as the audience awaits the start of the keynote. 

Goldberg will have to wait, it seems - first to hit the stage is a group of neon-clad dancers performing in front of an impressive promotional video featuring some stunning visuals.

It’s time for the show to kick off now. Goldberg hits the stage with loud applause from the audience and begins to talk about how much SuiteWorld has grown as an event (hence a bigger venue). He talks about NetSuite’s global expansion before thanking some of the sponsors of the event. 

Now he moves on to the theme of the talk, which is all about growth. 

“You want you’re growing business to be like the redwood trees,” he says, explaining that the NetSuite is essentially the “root system” of your business (which is the redwood above ground in this analogy).

Unsurprisingly, AI gets a mention not far into the keynote, which Goldberg says will also help power this mission of growth.  

Now, Goldberg brings out Hillel Cooperman, senior vice president of user experience design at Oracle, to talk about - you guessed it - user experience. Cooperman talks about how the standard of software has “gone up” since people have started using smartphones. 

The focus here is on the importance of making enterprise software as enjoyable to use as consumer software, despite its complexity. Users also need a seamless experience to get the most out of their enterprises.

Software should adapt to a user's needs, rather than the other way around, Cooperman says.

“Another thing is making search work amazingly,” Cooperman adds. Instead of having to navigate various complex searches, software should make searching for things simple in an enterprise setting. 

On the AI front, it’s the same story - the technology can be used to make everything more accessible and easier to use for humans, with AI helping to sift through the jargon and get to the focus point of a task more easily.  

Now the pair get up some examples of this in NetSuite’s ‘Redwood’ product (hence the tree analogy earlier.) Cooperman talks the audience through an onscreen demo, highlighting the simplicity of using the tool. 

Redwood is now available, Goldberg says after Cooperman leaves the stage, and the tool will be available across the platform. It’s also making its debut in the 'Customer 360' dashboard. 

Another announcement now, with Goldberg unveiling some of the new features for the firm’s Netsuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform. Now, this tool uses AI to automatically generate ‘financial narratives', which help simplify and streamline complex information. You can read some of our more in-depth reporting on this announcement here: 

NetSuite expands AI to enhance performance management, analytics offerings

The firm is also bringing ‘Ask Oracle’ into NetSuite, as well as a new first AI assistant for SuiteAnalytics. Goldberg brings up a video to show off these new tools. In the demo, an employee asks the tool why a spike in sales has occurred, with the AI tools delivering insights in response.

The employee asks NetSuite questions, such as whether or not the business has enough inventory to deliver a campaign, or how much the business should order if demand suddenly goes up. The employee can also ask the assistant to share insights with colleagues.  

Goldberg then mentions ‘Text Enhance,’ a tool announced at last year's SuiteWorld. This tool has been expanded to many different platforms, he adds. The next level, though, is `NetSuite Prompt Studio.’ According to another demo video, Prompt Studio allows users to deploy prompts across records via plain language instructions.

Next up, Goldberg invites Jan Arendtsz, founder and CEO of Celigo. He talks about using NetSuite’s products to power Celigo, which is focused on automating business processes. Celigo is also using AI, deploying agents and bots to automate knowledge processes and help businesses gain access to insights. Drafting emails or answering questions about health benefits are two use cases Arendtsz lists. 

Arendtsz leaves the stage now and Goldberg moves swiftly on to the next announcement, ‘Oracle Code Assist for SuiteScript.’ This is essentially a coding assistant, targeted at developers to make their lives easier.

Now, Goldberg introduces ‘Netsuite Guided Learning Managed Service.’ This allows users to create customized guided interfaces for staff if they need to learn how to perform certain processes within NetSuite. 

In a similar vein, ‘NetSuite Learning Cloud support,’ provides users with 1,000s of hours of online learning courses to help users utilize everything within the NetSuite platform. 

He talks up ‘NetSuite Connector,’ introducing ‘NetSuite Connector for Salesforce.’ This will help businesses “sell more and spend less,” Goldberg assures the crowds. The firm also has similar 'Connectors' with other big names in the tech space.

Now it’s time for Goldber’s “favorite” part of the talk - customer success stories. First up, it’s Jess Wijesekera from Vytalize Health. Wijesekera explains a bit about the company, saying that it provides services to give doctors more time in their roles. 

Wijesekera talks about automation via NetSuite, which has helped the firm drive efficiency. Vytalize has 37 bank accounts with 1,000s of transactions and NetSuite has been hugely helpful in this area. 

The firm also makes its payments through NetSuite, which helps Vytalize maintain a level of control over its financials. One staff member apparently “automated” themselves right out of a job, only to - phew - move over to another part of the business.  

Next up is customer number 2, PRx Performance (a gym equipment company that got its break on the US version of Dragons Den, Shark Tank). CEO Brian Brasch hits the stage, talking about the company’s sales before and after the Shark Tank deal. 

PRx outgrew its ERP system, Brasch says, which was a huge problem in COVID when people were ordering PRx’s products en masse. The firm moved to NetSuite as a result and saw huge improvements. 

After Brasch leaves the stage, it’s time to end the keynote. Goldberg explains that there’s a packed schedule ahead over the next few days before thanking everyone for attending. Once he’s left the stage, the crowds begin to filter out. 

Researchers have warned of a new vulnerability in NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce tool that could expose sensitive data. 

Stemming from misconfigured access controls, the vulnerability leaves sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) exposed, including the full addresses and mobile phone numbers of customers

The vulnerability has already left several thousand live SuiteCommerce websites vulnerable and the extent of potential damage could be far-reaching.

"NetSuite is one of the world’s leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and handles business critical data for thousands of organizations,” AppOmni researcher Aaron Costello told ITPro.

“My research found that thousands of these organizations are leaking sensitive customer data to the public through misconfigurations in their access controls. The sheer scale at which I found these exposures to be occurring is significant,” he added.

Costello noted that the issue can be attributed to “the way that access controls are configured in SuiteCommerce instances.”

These access controls are misconfigured more specifically in custom record types (CRTs), a form of table created by enterprises who use the SuiteCommerce platform.

Using a test environment to create a proof of concept (PoC) for the attack vector, Costello outlined how it would be possible for a malicious actor to exfiltrate data as an unauthenticated user.

Assuming an attacker knows the name of the CRT - which can be done through observation of HTTP traffic or brute-forcing the API endpoint - they can then obtain record identifications within the same CRT.

Once they have the record IDs, the attacker can read the data with “load record” by sending a request to the “Burp Intruder tab.” They could also read specific fields using “search record” functions.

NetSuite does not provide “readily available transaction logs” though, according to the report. Such logs could be useful in determining the malicious use of the client-side APIs deployed on this attack vector.

“If you suspect that your organization may have been the victim of an attack that resembles a pattern similar to what was discussed in this blog post, we recommend contacting NetSuite support and requesting the raw log data,” Costello advised.

To mitigate against future risk, administrators need to tighten up access controls on CRTs, as well as convert sensitive fields to “None” for public access so that information is not as vulnerable.

Admins should also consider taking impacted sites offline, at least for the time being, so as to prevent the exposure of data any further.

“Many organizations are struggling to implement and maintain a robust SaaS security program,” Costello said.

“Through research like this, AppOmni strives to educate and equip organizations so that they may be better prepared to identify and tackle both known and unknown risks to their SaaS applications,” he added.

The vast majority of Oracle Java users are migrating all or some of their use, claims Java platform Azul Systems, with most of those who have already done so saying the process went as planned.

According to the company's global Oracle Java Usage, Pricing & Migration Survey and Report, 86% of Oracle Java users are migrating all or some of their use, with reasons including cost, a preference for open source, uncertainty over Oracle's ongoing pricing changes and the threat of a Java usage audit.

More than eight in ten organizations that have already migrated away from Oracle Java report the process was easier than expected or went as planned, while three quarters say they completed their migrations in less than 12 months and nearly a quarter within three months.

Just over half of the 663 Java professionals surveyed cited Oracle Java as being too expensive, while 47% said they preferred to use an open-source distribution like OpenJDK.

Last year, Oracle changed its pricing model from usage-based payment models to a per-employee fee. And four in ten pointed to ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support from Oracle as the reason they wanted to make a move. A quarter mentioned concerns about potential Java usage audits by Oracle and a similar number said that Oracle support was not meeting their expectations.

"The data from the Oracle Java Usage, Pricing & Migration Survey, and Report paints a clear picture: Java users are looking for an equivalent or better alternative to Oracle Java SE which can address their business concerns regarding licensing and support costs and risk of an audit," said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO at Azul. 

"There is a better path forward: organizations who have switched to commercially supported distributions based on OpenJDK report smooth experiences and achieved significant cost savings."

According to Azul Systems, Oracle's share of Java Development Kit (JDK) usage has been declining for years, from about 75% of the JDK distribution market in 2020 to 42% in 2023.

According to Azul, two-thirds of organizations that switched from Oracle Java to OpenJDK distributions were able to save on costs. And 83% of the Java professionals said they needed support for production applications, including paid support, support bundled with their existing cloud and infrastructure platform, or both. 

When considering what they valued most in paid support for an OpenJDK distribution, participants said the top five reasons were technical expertise, at 61%, timely releases and fixes at 54%, customer support at 42%, stabilized security-only updates at 40%, and migration expertise at 39%.

"The exodus away from Oracle Java is driven by mounting concerns over pricing changes and a growing preference for open-source alternatives. While some organizations initially hesitated to make the switch, our survey reveals that those who have migrated to OpenJDK distributions have had a positive experience," said Sellers. 

"It's clear that the Java community is voting with its feet, seeking more cost-effective, flexible, and open solutions for their Java applications and Java-based infrastructure."

ITPro has approached Oracle for comment.

Oracle has announced plans to open its third cloud region in Spain as part of a $1 billion investment scheme. 

The new public cloud region is targeted at all industries in Spain, but in particular its prominent financial services sector.

Customers will be able to migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while conforming to regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the European Outsourcing Guidelines - EBA, EIOPA and ESMA.

Telefonica España will be the host partner, Oracle confirmed.

"It is great news that major technology multinationals such as Oracle are announcing this level of investment in the Region of Madrid,” said Miguel López-Valverde, councilor for digitalization, Government of the Region of Madrid.

"Over the next three years, the region of Madrid is expected to receive investments of more than six billion Euros from the cloud industry, which is critical to helping us build a digital economy capable of creating high-quality jobs, attracting investment, and retaining talent."

Oracle already operates a separate EU Sovereign Cloud with a region in Madrid, to help public and private sector customers with data and applications that are sensitive, regulated, or of strategic regional importance, move to the cloud.

This is  operated by EU-based personnel and supports workloads that fall under EU guidelines and requirements for sovereignty and data privacy.

"Spanish enterprises and public sector organizations are rapidly embracing the cloud to gain access to the latest digital technologies such as AI, and the upcoming public cloud in Madrid will help them address data residency requirements as well as regulations in key sectors such as financial services," said Albert Triola, country leader, Oracle Spain.

"With our plans to invest an additional $1 billion in Spain over the next ten years, we are reaffirming our commitment to helping Spanish organizations of all sizes and industries – including those across Spain’s small and medium-sized enterprises and the financial services industry – accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies to boost business performance and resilience."

The new Madrid region will offer additional low-latency access to cloud services, along with high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, the firm said

And, targeting the financial services industry, Oracle said it can help customers to evaluate OCI in the context of their regulatory outsourcing guidance.

"We rely on Oracle to migrate our critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure while complying with local regulatory requirements. OCI provides us with a robust and secure cloud infrastructure," said Enríque Rodríguez, director of technology services at Banco Sabadell.

"The arrival of the third Oracle Cloud Region in Spain will open significant opportunities for us in terms of utilizing new technologies such as AI across different areas of our business."

Oracle is the latest firm to bet big on Spain

The announcement from Oracle follows a raft of similar moves by other major cloud providers in Spain in recent months. 

Microsoft recently confirmed plans to invest $2.1 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure in the country by the end of next year, with one region located in Madrid.

Similarly, AWS revealed plans to invest €15.7 billion in Spain to beef up cloud and AI infrastructure.

A common recurring theme in these investment plans has been access to renewable energy sources. AWS' expansion in the country also included investment in 12 renewable energy projects. 

In February 2024, Cisco confirmed it had signed a 15-year commitment with Spanish renewable energy provider, IGNIS, to construct a new solar energy plant in the Aragon province to support its European operations and meet sustainability targets.

Oracle has teamed up with Google Cloud in a bid to simplify cloud migration and multi-cloud deployment and management.

Through Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect, organizations will be able to combine Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Google Cloud technologies for general-purpose workloads with no cross-cloud data transfer charges.

It will initially be available for customers onboarding in 11 global regions, while later this year a new offering, Oracle Database@Google Cloud, will launch with the same features and pricing as OCI.

"Customers want the flexibility to use multiple clouds," said Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison.

"By putting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hardware in Google Cloud datacenters, customers can benefit from the best possible database and network performance."

Oracle Database@Google Cloud will give customers direct access to Oracle database services running on OCI and deployed in Google Cloud data centers.

The will provide flexible options to simplify and help the migration of Oracle databases to Google Cloud, the firms said, including compatibility with migration tools such as Oracle Zero-Downtime Migration.

Through Google Cloud Marketplace, customers will be able to buy Oracle database services using their existing Google Cloud commitments, maintaining existing Oracle license benefits such as Bring Your Own License and discount programs such as Oracle Support Rewards.

Users can connect their Oracle data with Google’s AI services, including Vertex AI and Gemini foundation models, for applications such as customer service, employee services, creative studios and developer environments.

The companies plan to kick off with regions in North America and Europe. Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Autonomous Database Service, and Oracle Real Application Clusters will launch later this year across the US East region, US West, UK South, and Germany Central, expanding soon after to more regions worldwide.

Meanwhile, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cross-Cloud Interconnect will allow customers to use a direct, low latency interconnection between OCI and Google Cloud, run multiple Oracle applications on OCI and Google Cloud and build new cloud native applications using Google Cloud and OCI technologies including Google Cloud’s AI capabilities.

Google said that, over the years, joint enterprise customers have been asking for a unified framework allowing them to use Oracle’s database and enterprise application offerings with Google Cloud offerings and AI solutions such as Gemini and Vertex AI to modernize and accelerate cloud migrations.

"However, as customers explored the existing multi-vendor, multi-cloud options, these solutions lacked sufficient choice and the native integration options to meet customers' technical and commercial requirements," said director of product management, databases, Gurmeet Goindi and director of product management, databases, Karan Batta.

Customers often faced extra costs such as cross-cloud data transfer charges, and missed out on end-to-end enterprise-grade support for these architectures.

"This partnership is an investment and innovation on behalf of our joint customers to address these challenges," they said.

Public cloud spending is rocketing, according to IDC, as enterprises continue to invest in infrastructure expansion and ramp up AI adoption.

Figures from the consultancy’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker show total global revenue in the public cloud services market hit $669.2 billion in 2023, marking a 19.9% increase on the year previous.

The biggest single contributor was Software as a Service (SaaS) spending IDC noted, which accounted for nearly 45% of the total.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was the second largest category, with 19.9% of the total, while Platform as a Service (PaaS) spending accounted for 18.4% of overall revenue.

PaaS spending experienced some of the fastest year-over-year revenue growth across 2023, which was partly fueled by heightened investment in AI, according to IDC's Adam Reeves.

"In large part due to end-user investment in AI, PaaS revenue growth continues to outpace the overall cloud market,” he said.

"Both market share-leading vendors and smaller providers continue to release PaaS-delivered AI offerings. Vendors are focused on being strategic partners to their customers by delivering highly performant, developer-friendly, trustworthy, and secure offerings that help users deliver intelligent applications more efficiently."

All the same names dominate the public cloud market

As in previous years, the market last year was dominated by the top five public cloud service providers – Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle – which between them accounted for 40.5% of the worldwide total.

With offerings in all four public cloud categories, Microsoft held the top spot, with a 16.8% share in 2023, followed by AWS with a 12.4% market share.

IDC said the market is likely to continue to expand moving forward. Worldwide public cloud services revenue will top $800 billion this year, it predicts, up 20.5% over 2023, and with a similar increase expected in 2025.

Overall, the consultancy said there's likely to be a five-year compound annual growth rate of 19.5% with worldwide revenues reaching $1.6 trillion in 2028.

The main driver for all this growth is the shift of AI into the mainstream, which is pushing organizations to rethink their infrastructure strategy, according to Dave McCarthy, IDC's research vice president, cloud and edge infrastructure services.

"Public cloud IaaS will be an attractive source for AI-ready infrastructure as cloud service providers are heavily investing in the high-performance compute, storage, and networking services needed for AI workloads," he commented.

"The on-demand and pay-as-you-go tenets of cloud infrastructure facilitate access to the latest AI technology without large upfront investments or supply chain delays."

Oracle has revealed ‘Oracle AI Vector Search’ as part of the latest iteration of its converged database offering, giving enterprise customers a greater level of control over unstructured data stores. 

The entire release, dubbed ‘Oracle Database 23ai,’ contains over 300 additional features, though the cloud giant specifically highlighted vector search capabilities as a key highlight.

AI Vector Search will enable Oracle customers to search through unstructured datasets with more clarity and without needing to move or duplicate private business data.

Enterprise users will be able to search documents, images, and relational data “based on their conceptual content” rather than specific pieces of information such as words, pixels, or data values.

“AI Vector Search makes it possible for LLMs to query private business data using a natural language interface and helps LLMs provide more accurate and relevant results,” the firm said.

Developers can then easily add search capabilities to new and existing applications, including mission-critical applications that operate sensitive or security-intensive workloads.

Oracle wants to deliver greater value from enterprise data

Oracle said the launch is focused largely on simplifying the process of utilizing unstructured data.

By bringing “AI algorithms to where the data lives, instead of having to move the data to where the AI algorithm lives,” the firm’s new offering allows enterprises to streamline their use of unstructured data, which is becoming increasingly important for AI development.

“You have all of your enterprise business data sitting in Oracle Database - we're bringing the AI to where the business data resides,” Steve Zivanic, VP of database and autonomous services, said at a pre-briefing for the release.

Moving unstructured datasets around to operate vector search capabilities can be complex, and Oracle claims its new offering will lessen the load of this process.

“When you try to use a separate vector database, you have to try to maintain data consistency between the vector database and the business database,” Zivanic said. “That's not an easy challenge."

The growth rate for Java 17 has “exploded” and it has overtaken the previous most widely used long-term-support (LTS) version of the programming language, new research shows.

Oracle releases new Java versions every six months with some new features and bug fixes, and a new Java long-term-support (LTS) version with updates to help improve stability, security, and performance every two years.

The most recent of these were Java 21 in September 2023, Java 17 in September 2021, and Java 11 in September 2018.

The report from New Relic said that 9% of applications were using Java 17 in production in 2023, but now 35% of applications are using it. “The Java 17 growth rate exploded to a nearly 300% year-over-year increase”, the New Relic report said. 

“It took years for Java 11 to reach anywhere near that level.”

Java 17 is now the most popular version LTS version of Java, albeit just ahead of Java 11 which is now used by 32.9% of applications, the survey said, while Java 8 still accounts for 28.8% of applications.

Java 8 and Java 17 appear to be 'neck-and-neck'

Other research has put Java 8 and Java 17 neck-and-neck when it comes to their use in applications. Less than 2% of applications were using non-LTS versions of Java.

In the six months after the release of Java 21, 1.4% of applications monitored by New Relic were using it. While that might seem small, this is rapid adoption: in the six months after Java 17 was introduced, only 0.37% of applications were using it.

In terms of Java Development Kit (JDK) vendors, in 2020 Oracle was the most popular JDK vendor with about 75% of the market but there has been significant decline since then, to the point at which it now has a 21% market share.

Amazon’s recent popularity - 31% of the JDK market in 2023 – has apparently waned so that it now accounts for 18% in 2024, New Relic said.

It described Eclipse Adoptium as the ‘rising star’ as adoption grew from 12% to 18%, noting that, because Eclipse Adoptium is community-managed, this JDK tends to be updated more frequently than the Oracle and Amazon JDKs.

The New Relic report is based on data gathered from hundreds of thousands of applications reporting to New Relic in 2024 that provide performance information, but the company cautioned that it doesn’t provide a global picture of Java usage.

The report also looked at Java garbage collectors; these are memory management components used to prevent memory leaks, optimize memory usage, and ensure the overall performance and stability of Java applications.

Since Java 11, the Garbage-First (G1) GC has been the default, which is why 43% of customers are using it. The second most popular option is Serial (37%), which New Relic said is ideal for applications or systems that run on a single processor or where a high number of Java virtual machines (JVMs) are running on the same machine.

The New Relic data shows a jump 18% year-over-year in applications running with four or fewer cores. It said this shift makes a lot of sense in cloud environments where people are often deploying containers.

“This trend can pose unexpected issues for some applications. In particular, many of the concurrent benefits from the default G1 [garbage collector] on recent JVMs vanish when running with fewer than two cores. All those single-core instances may as well be using the Serial collector—and paying the performance cost of that,” the report said.

When looking at JVM memory settings, 32% of Java applications use 1GB or less and 68% use more than 1GB - a 15% increase in applications using more than 1GB of memory year-on-year.

New Relic found that 91% of Java applications use some form of logging tools to troubleshoot issues and fixes: the most-used logging framework was Log4j with 76% of Java applications using it, followed by JBoss Logging (61%) and Logback (52%).

Beyond this, the report said, most (83%) of Java developers rely on SLF4j, which is a framework that acts as an abstraction for other types of Java logging frameworks.

“SLF4j enables software developers to use the logging framework of their choice and enables applications to switch to any Java logging framework interchangeably without impacting its implementations or doing any changes,” the report said. It this way, SLF4j makes applications independent of logging frameworks.

More than two-thirds (41%) of the Java applications reporting to New Relic use encryption libraries: 17% use the excellently-named Bouncy Castle, 16% use Spring Security, and 6% use Jasypt.

The report noted that Bouncy Castle has been a popular library for encryption for many years, due to its set of cipher suites and utilities.

Oracle Database is the most widely used database, with 17% of Java applications reporting to New Relic using it, followed by PostgreSQL at 14%: MySQL comes in third, with 13% of Java applications using it.

“PostgresSQL has gained popularity in the last year because it’s more compliant with the SQL specs and it supports more features than MySQL. MySQL is still a top database system, but we can see that its popularity is decreasing while PostgresSQL’s popularity is growing,” the report said.

Java remains one of the most popular programming languages, according to the 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey,

Java is the seventh most popular programming language among professional developers. Tech analyst RedMonk lists Java as joint number two in its programming languages ranking, meanwhile Tiobe has it at number four on its list.

Oracle NetSuite has announced the EMEA release for its integrated planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution and a suite-wide generative AI text tool.

In an announcement at NetSuite’s SuiteConnect London event, the firm said that NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is now available across the EMEA region. 

EPM’s predictive algorithms can be used to uncover trends in a business’ data, automate financial reporting or account closures, and produce forecasts rooted in an enterprise’s data.

NetSuite EPM was first announced at SuiteWorld 2023, as a combined solutions package across account management workflows and corporate reporting. 

Leaders can also use the product to run modeling with Evan Goldberg, EVP and founder at NetSuite, giving the example of a company using it to examine how a new product might affect their bottom line, or how new staff hires could impact expenses, revenue, or their supply chain.

Solutions contained within NetSuite EPM include:

• Planning and Budgeting
• Account Reconciliation
• Profitability and Cost Management
• Narrative Reporting
• Corporate Tax Reporting

Nicky Tozer, SVP EMEA at NetSuite, noted that in addition to helping firms track their business data using predictive algorithms, Planning and Budgeting can be configured to help companies with sustainability reporting.

“These ESG requirements are creating a lot of challenges for businesses and how they need to report differently on that. There are now 80 countries worldwide who are mandating e-invoicing and that’s creating a lot of challenges for people who are operating outside the UK,” said Tozer.

In correlating data with plans drawn from across a customer’s ecosystem, NetSuite says EPM can help companies build a sustainable business model and make data-driven decisions.

NetSuite customers using the platform for ESG reporting include The Cheeky Panda, an environmental paper products firm. Goldberg said the firm uses NetSuite to prove its products save 400,000 trees per year, alongside NetSuite’s Warehouse Management system.

Analytics and ‘doing more with less’

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, the firm’s AI-integrated cloud data warehouse and data analytics product, has also been a focus of announcements at SuiteConnect London.

Analytics Warehouse is intended to make data management easier, flag anomalous data, and help customers surface insights into their data without the need for a complex understanding of data science.

A new solution titled Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector allows companies to consolidate data from a range of NetSuite instances into one environment. Goldberg said this will be beneficial for private equity firms, or parent companies of franchises, who can use the tool to see a unified picture across their entire portfolio.

Analytics Warehouse is already available for the UK but has now been expanded to additional countries across EMEA.

Goldberg and Tozer focused on the phrase ‘do more with less’ throughout the plenary session of the event, with Analytics Warehouse said to align directly with this mentality.

“It’s not just about saving on expenses – that’s the ‘do less’ part – it’s about growing, which is the ‘do more’ part,” said Goldberg.

Highlighting a divide among customers right now, Goldberg said some are looking to see what is working and where they can boost areas good for ROI and those focused on what’s not working and what difficult decisions have to be made.

“All of these changes require insight, so you can predict the returns on investments and they also require agility to actually execute this extraction.”

“Automation is increasingly supercharged through AI, that’s really key to scaling your tasks and processes. But scalability also requires collaboration among humans, you have individuals and departments and technology solutions.”

NetSuite Text Enhance

NetSuite also announced today that it is making NetSuite Text Enhance, its generative AI tool that outputs across the NetSuite platform, available in the UK.

The product was premiered at SuiteWorld 2023 for an initial North American release, but has now expanded to the UK. Using NetSuite Text Enhance, customers can quickly fill reports, forms, or emails. The tool is powered by an LLM developed by Cohere and draws on context from a business’ estate to produce text that is as accurate to a user’s needs as possible.

In a demonstration, a user was shown highlighting text in an email and selecting ‘clean up’ to improve the clarity of their text and help localize it for UK customers.

“Your teams can save time on item descriptions, job descriptions, and other types of long-form content,” said Goldberg.

Since it first announced new generative AI features in 2023, NetSuite has emphasized an “AI everywhere” approach but also stressed the importance of grounding all AI outputs in enterprise data.

“Every business has a lot of unstructured data which is humans talking to humans,” said Brian Chess, SVP technology and AI at Oracle NetSuite. Chess pointed out the scope and complexity of using AI to assist with text operations across the entire suite.

“If AI is going to be everywhere, then you don’t bolt on a chatbot with a cute name in the sidebar because that puts the AI just over in the corner. That’s not where it belongs, it needs to be built-in.”

“We can give that LLM the context, so that LLM knows where you are in the application, what you’re doing, and has access to the business data around that text area, which makes it a heck of a lot smarter than something you would just roll for.”

As yet, there is no date for Text Enhance to be made available in territories outside the UK and North America.

In conversation with the assembled press, Chess stated that this is down to an “issue of data sovereignty,” as Text Enhance within the UK will be operated within the UK. Further rollout of the feature will require a territory-by-territory approach.

NetSuite’s intention is for its generative AI to eventually have the capability to process all the languages that NetSuite already reports. For now, AI features like Text Enhance only work for English language tasks.

Oracle appears keen on cutting generative AI-related hyperbole from its lexicon in favor of a more straight talking approach as the firm targets big gains in the space.

Taking to the stage for Oracle CloudWorld 2024, Doug Kehring, EVP of Oracle’s corporate operations, led the charge on the company’s strategy, championing its purist enterprise focus and taking potshots at a few rivals in the process.

“All we do is enterprise technology,” he said. “We don't build gaming systems, we don't do consumer advertising, and we certainly don't write term papers for your kids.”

With the dizzying hype around generative AI over the last 15 months resulting in a myriad of new product and service announcements from major industry players, Oracle looks set for a more reserved and measured approach to the technology, and is setting its sight on practical AI functionality. 

“We are deeply focused … on delivering [the] most extensive end to end set of technologies to help any organization within any industry automate their business,” Kehring said.  

Oracle said its AI product portfolio is designed with enterprises in mind, geared towards accelerating revenue, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing the quality of user experiences. 

So far, it seems to be doing something right. The company recently topped its quarterly profit estimates and saw cloud revenue jump by 25% alongside a 29% bump in other performance obligations. 

Though it may struggle to compete on a brand level with the likes of Microsoft or AWS at present, it nonetheless boasts a small but promising foothold in the cloud infrastructure market through its offerings.

To Oracle, the key is driving real-world, clearly defined value for any business that uses its products.

“Other vendors may offer similar technologies to Oracle - although I'd argue they're not nearly as good - but that's not enough anymore,” Kehring said.  

“Technology by itself is no longer enough … rather, it's the value that the technology can deliver as part of a broader transformation. That's what matters,” he added.

This is the basis on which Oracle positions itself, helping to clearly generate value through its targeted solutions.

Like the umbrella name of its new AI offerings, Oracle strives for clarity -  “what never goes out of style is to keep it simple, so we went with a name that's easy to remember - Oracle AI,” Kehring said.

What makes Oracle’s new AI attractive to enterprises 

Embedding AI features within Oracle tools "from the ground up" is key to the company’s value proposition moving forward, Kehring said, and it was a concept referred to repeatedly throughout the flurry of announcements at the London conference. 

“AI, for us, is embedded from the start,” he told delegates. The new features unveiled by the company, all of which are united under the roof of Oracle’s existing Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, have been designed with the overarching mission of improving decision making and enhancing both employee and customer experience.

Oracle will be supporting over fifty generative AI use cases within Oracle Fusion, and, as the company claimed, these features will be integrated within “existing business workflows” spanning finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and customer services.

It will be plugging AI into four aspects of the Fusion Cloud Application Suite, namely the Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Cloud Supply Chain and Manufacturing (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), and Customer Experience (CX) platforms. 

AI tools within these platforms will serve a huge range of functions, including insight narratives, project proposal generation, negotiation summaries, and job category landing pages, to name only a handful. 

The firm was keen to emphasize that it’s targeting a huge range of enterprise-grade AI use cases across these offerings, firmly underscoring a desire to position itself as the go-to leader in the enterprise cloud market. 

Rajan Krishnan, group vice president at Oracle Product Development, told ITPro the new offerings have been made possible by its existing technology infrastructure, which stands it in good stead for the coming years. 

“We have both vectors, we have the technology side covered, we have the horizontal processes like ERP and HCM covered,” Krishnan said. Similarly, the robust nature of this existing technology stack allows for an ease of roll out in new AI tools. 

“That robust infrastructure allows us to introduce all these things so rapidly, and we are the beneficiaries,” Krishnan said. 

Oracle success is mirrored by its customers

Kehring said Oracle defines its success in the “reflection” of its customer success, and while that has an air of promotional rhetoric about it, it does seem to be the case that Oracle’s new offerings have been a hit with customers thus far. 

Oracle CloudWorld’s billing of speakers was packed end-to-end with customer success stories, all the way from Nokia to the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

These stories helped sing Oracle’s praises in the B2B space, yet further setting the cloud company apart from competition and highlighting a range of tangible success stories. 

“We put your success in the heart of everything we do … and we're really here to serve,” Kehring said. 

Ocado Retail is touting its successful modernization journey by announcing the migration of its key business systems to the cloud via two of Oracle’s enterprise-focused platforms. 

The retail giant was able to generate improved decision-making insights through the project,  as well as streamlined business processes by modernizing its platforms. 

The impetus for the project was one of pragmatism, as says Rebecca Burn, Oracle systems manager at Ocado Retail, in conversation with ITPro. 

As a joint venture between Marks & Spencer and Ocado Group, Ocado Retail’s systems were previously located within Ocado Group's on-premises infrastructure.

“The requirement really was to give us that independence … we knew that we needed to move off that system,” Burn tells ITPro, adding that, as Ocado Group had already undergone its cloud transformation, the retail wing needed to make its own move to negate the necessity for Ocado Group’s existing “legacy infrastructure”.

This move was all about a drive towards an independent platform for Ocado Retail, Burn says. With over 961,000 active customers and continued growth, Ocado Retail now uses Oracle Fusion Applications to drive more efficient business processes.

How Ocado Retail revamped its cloud infrastructure 

Ocado Retail deployed both Oracle Fusion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, the firm’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in its migration efforts. These platforms helped shift Ocado’s infrastructure over to the cloud in slightly different ways. 

The use of Oracle Fusion EPM was very much an upgrade, Burn says, as Ocado Retail had already been using the previous version of Oracle’s EPM. The company knew that it needed the updated version and saw that this was a “really good opportunity” to get it. 

With Oracle Cloud EPM, Ocado Retail was able to overhaul several of its key business requirements, allowing it to greatly improve decision-making, as well as scenario modeling, and built-in advanced analytics. Enhanced financial reporting was also a positive result of using EPM, Burn says, alongside enhanced syncing with the other Oracle system, Oracle Fusion ERP.

“It meant that we could have a more real time feed from ERP to the EPM which we didn't have before,” Burn says. 

Through the migration, Ocado Retail has harnessed the ability to automate its financial processes, streamline its procurement framework, and improve controls. This has primarily come about as a result of it consolidating several business systems into one enterprise-scale software as a service (SaaS) application.

Burn describes the move to ERP with enthusiasm, saying it put Ocado Retail “on a modern platform” fit for continued evolution and improvement. As part of the move, Ocado Retail can also now choose from Oracle’s updates in areas such as AI and machine learning (ML).

A smooth migration, but still a learning curve

Ocado’s cloud transformation was fairly straightforward, according to Burn. “From an implementation perspective, it was really painless … it was really smooth,” Burn says. 

Part of the reason for this was down to the fact the firm made sure it was “really prepared” beforehand, having laid groundwork for around a year ahead of the move. Burn says this involved, among other things, a total data cleanse to get it in a good place for future expansion.

That’s not to say that Ocado Retail wouldn’t have done a few things differently if it were to undertake the challenge again, Burn elaborates, citing the issue of moving transactions as part of cloud migration.  

“An invoice could have been added in [two] months ago but now it's … sitting in this period, which just means it looks a bit different,” Burn says.

The ramifications of this, she adds, is that finance users may be confused as to why their transactions look different from what they expected. This issue put “change management” front and center as a learning experience for Burn. 

Managing the overall change was made easier by the presence of Oracle’s “guided learning” system, Burn adds, which she describes as “priceless” in its ability to direct users through specific queries.

As Ocado Retail moves forward with its new systems in place, the firm will continue to see positive results and enhancements in productivity, better placing the firm for future success and modernization.

Automation and localization can both lighten the load for businesses in different ways. 

Without proper localization, a company may find one of its subsidiaries in breach of a regional tax code or data competency requirement. 

Without automation, businesses can languish with manual tasks and find themselves unable to expand and achieve the kind of worldwide growth for which they are aiming.

The onset of AI has also changed this equation dramatically, crossing over with both automation and localization and bringing its fundamental implementation curve.

In this episode, recorded live at SuiteWorld 2023, Rory is joined by James Chisham, VP of product management at NetSuite, to give examples of where automation and localization have been used to address business problems, and to question where AI can fit in the mix.

Highlights

“What's happening is those tax authorities are going on a digital transformation journey. So they want to be able to capture that data for taxes in near real-time, which is really powering the e-invoicing movement if we can call it that. So countries are hopping on board, you know, regularly and we think our customers need to be ahead of that and be prepared as mandates continue to be introduced.”

“You think about some of the cultural use of language and the intonation. And then I was suddenly questioning, will AI be able to do all of that for us? Even in some of the examples that we've shown this week, you can tell it to simplify the text, but can you give that text subtlety and, again, when you're talking about some very rich languages that exist across the globe could it really do that?”

“We refer to localization here at NetSuite, and certainly in my group, as a continuum. You know, it never stops. It's constantly evolving.”

Footnotes

• NetSuite aims to be a ‘global local solution’, set to double down on automation
• NetSuite aims to bolster finance teams with new AI planning tools
• Oracle unveils ‘sovereign cloud’ region for EU customers amid lingering sovereignty worries
• Slack says automation can save every employee a month of work per year

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Good morning and welcome back to our live coverage of the 2023 SuiteWorld conference, live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. 

There's not long to go until this morning's keynote, so be sure to keep up to date with all the latest announcements from NetSuite in our rolling coverage. 

We can expect a jam-packed agenda today at SuiteWorld 2023, and the opening keynote session will likely include a raft of new announcements from NetSuite. Stay tuned!

The conference floor is already lively here in Caesars Forum, where the keynote is set to kick off in just over an hour.

This morning's theme is 'SuiteUp', a phrase used throughout the conference this year to describe powerful new innovations across NetSuite's product offering.

We'll be hearing lots on this from Evan Goldberg, EVP and founder at NetSuite. Other speakers set to take the stage include Kimberly Deobald, chief revenue officer at Avalara, Natalie Laackman, CFO at MedSpeed, and Martin Kon, president and COO at Cohere.

Generative AI is of course a headline-grabbing topic right now, and it's a safe bet that we'll hear news around it during the keynote. This is the moment for NetSuite to lay out its approach to generative AI.

We'll be bringing you all the announcements as they're made, so stay tuned.

There are just five minutes until the keynote is set to start, and the hall is already packed with attendees. This year's keynote will take place in the round it seems, with the audience grouped around the stage on all sides.

'25 years of NetSuite' is displayed prominently throughout the hall, and we can expect to celebrate this milestone in the keynote itself.

The conference floor is electric, with club beats playing over the speakers are complemented by a waveform visualizer shown on the arrow-shaped screens that surround the crowd at the edge of the hall.

"While it's no longer the 90s, please silence all modern mobile devices," we've just been told. Perhaps we're celebrating 25 years through a trip back to 1998 first thing.

We've started with a statement of mourning for the lives lost in Israel and Palestine, and the condemnation of terrorism. The hall has observed a moment of silence.

The keynote has begun, with a dance piece set to the sound of dial-up — a flashback to 1998, with the launch of NetLedger.

We've been shown a montage of key moments in NetSuite's corporate history, and are now focusing on the future of the firm, with the slogan 'SuiteUp'.

We've been introduced to EvanGPT, the 'new' EVP of NetSuite, in the first generative AI joke of the day.

EvanGPT has thanked the "liquid mercury sponsor", Salesforce - and with that, NetSuite EVP Evan Goldberg has rushed onto stage to turn off the chatbot for now.
"It's hallucinating again!" he's said, and has moved on with a human-led conference instead.

Goldberg is focusing on where NetSuite has come from, noting how it was the first company to pursue cloud computing. Beyond cloud, Goldberg says that since 1998 the firm has moved onto delivering the most comprehensive suite possible.

Promising to bring customers the most sophisticated AI anywhere, Goldberg says that by the end of the year, all NetSuite customers will be running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which will allow them to take advantage of the platform's AI offerings.

"This time is as revolutionary as that time 25 years ago, when we introduced the cloud. AI appears to be a quantum leap to doing more with less."

Goldberg promises today's announcements will help firms achieve more, while spending less. 

More on that term 'SuiteUp now. 

"It's continuing to automate, connecting more of your business, bringing additional functions into the suite for better insights and better efficiency."

Goldberg says customers who use NetSuite Planning and Budgeting are growing sales transactions three times faster.

We’re starting with an announcement on financial departments.

Modern financial departments in a fast-growing company have an explosion of processes and demands. It’s hard to keep up.”

To meet these needs, NetSuite is bringing its automation technologies and new modules under the new category of NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

The new category brings automation tools, all informed by the data across a costumer’s environment. It can be used to help build a plan, and uses AI to continuously monitor plans and forecasts.

“We’re bringing data science to the finance organization, without having to hire data scientists or become a data scientist yourself. Just plug it in.”

EPM can also automate financial close management, reducing time spent on tasks such as task assignment data and validation approval.

Across the EPM category, NetSuite seeks to help customers automate the entire process from planning to account close, tax accounting, and narrative reporting.

For more on EPM, read our full coverage here.

We're moving at pace through a slew of AI announcements. Goldberg has announced new AI features for Bill Capture in AP Automation, which can now draw details from documents using context clues from previous documents.

We're also hearing more about NetSuite Benchmark 360, which uses an anonymized aggregate of customer data to compare their benchmarks against competitors in the same sector or region.

We’re now being shown a customer video, focusing on the role NetSuite has played in supporting MedSpeed, a firm that is working to transform same-day delivery for medical couriers.

Here to explain more is Natalie Laackman, CFO at MedSpeed.

"The big idea for us was same-day logistics in the medical industry, that's thousands of transactions per day - millions actually. Time and miles is cost, so as we leverage those costs we asked "could we develop a better solution?"

Goldberg prompts Laackman on NetSuite's recent work with the firm on sustainability.

"The big idea from NetSuite was to pursue the electrification of our fleet. We have over 2,000 vehicles, it will take a while for us to get all of this figured out, but we have been rolling out electric vehicles and charging stations. 

"And we could quickly use NetSuite to track the total cost of ownership of the fleet, and be able to effectively communicate to the clients that are demanding electrification and sustainability metrics."

We're switching tack now, to a focus on growth.

"There's more to life than belt-tightening," Goldberg says while acknowledging that manual processes are currently preventing many firms from effectively expanding.

A third of NetSuite's customers across 219 countries are operating in muiltiple regions, and Goldberg says NetSuite is committed to helping these firms handle their subsidiaries and do more with less.

E-invoicing is just one way that customers can do this, Goldberg says. Today NetSuite is announcing NetSuite Electronic Invoicing SuiteApp.

Tax compliance software provider Avalara is partnering with NetSuite to help companies meet e-invoicing mandates for 2030.

Here to explain more is Kimberly Deobald, chief revenue officer at Avalara.

"Our expertise is understanding these tax compliance requirements, and actually working with governments to make sure we're helping to set those requirements."

The goal, Deobald says, is to take the strain of tax off the table so that business leaders can focus 100% on growth. We've been promised a more in-depth look at e-invoicing in tomorrow's product keynote.

EvanGPT is back briefly, to clean up Goldberg's grammar - a tease of an upcoming feature.

For now, we're focusing on NetSuite Pay, a new product that works to automate payment systems including credit cards and bank transfers.

"Take the focus away from time-sucking tasks," Goldberg says, circling back to the theme of focusing on growth.

On the same note, NetSuite is launching Field Service Management, a product that helps workers in the field communicate with the back office and reduces "chaos" in scheduling and dispatching.

It's been created through the acquisition of Next Technik, which has closed today.

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is also getting a raft of new features, with new AI-powered predictive analytics based on pre-built machine learning models.

Goldberg says customers will also now be able to embed analytics directly into dashboards, "in front of users that can actually act on them".

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse users will be given 40 free connectors, which the system can automatically convert into business intelligence, alongside a host of new visualizations such as charts, pivots, and heat maps.

Here to talk about how their firm has embraced NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is Jeff Hampton, head of reporting and analytics at leading US fine wine marketer Terlato Wine Group.

Hampton says before NetSuite, the firm relied on a maddening mix of Microsoft Access, Excel, and pivot tables which led to duplicate sets of information and a lack of clarity on insights.

Through NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, his team has been able to put actuals next to budget in one dashboard, and pursue growth and greater productivity in a way they never previously could.

Terlato Wine Group is only a year into NetSuite, and Hampton says that he's always discovering new and exciting modules and features within the system.

"We have implemented demand planning, we're scratching the surface on OCR, and building workflows to ensure continued data validation. With four updates per year with NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, I'm always discovering a new feature we can leverage."

Goldberg has been joined by a wacky waving inflatable tube man, with circus music as a backing, as he rattles off some "crazy deals" to celebrate the firm's 25th anniversary.

To deliver more value for customers, NetSuite is also releasing Customer 360, which tracks behavior and provides more visibility over customers using automation and AI.

It can summarize and sales and key metrics such as actual order values, and show an overview for payments and credits.

Moving onto AI in more detail now. Goldberg acknowledges that NetSuite already uses AI in products such as Planning and Budgeting, but that going forward the firm will be introducing the technology more and more.

This won't, of course, just be 'traditional' AI. He's going into more detail on generative AI now.

In line with this, Goldberg has announced Text Enhance, which can be used to generate copy anywhere inside NetSuite’s products. It's powered by a model from the AI firm Cohere, whose president and COO will be on stage soon to explain more.

We're being shown a demo now, in which Text Enhance produces a purchase description based on some simple prompts. It can also be used to produce a sales description, using a slightly different input to produce more form-appropriate output.

This is based on training, to ensure the model draws context from the right places to inform its output.

"The really cool part is you'll be able to control that, you can manipulate the prompts with which we produce the text."

For more information on NetSuite Text Enhance, read our full piece on the announcement.

Goldberg says that across NetSuite's value streams, the firm will be introducing more and more AI.

We're being shown a demonstration video for the fictional company Wyra (a returning name from last year's conference).

In the video, a user named Finley can use natural language prompts to ask NetSuite questions about a discount amount. The system responds with a recommended discount, with a graph to back up the projected outcome of the campaign.

Another user receives an alert that Finley has created a sales campaign, and see the automatically-produced projected sales and profit 

"This isn't just AI creating some recommended text," says the voiceover.

"It's a full service sales campaign assistant."

Across the approval process, NetSuite automatically produces data to show outcomes for the campaign, and even caps the plan with an AI-generated email preview based on the wording and information contained within previous emails.

In another demo, operations manager Cameron is shown that a critical order is being delayed due to weather, and the system has automatically anticipated that the storm has caused a road blockage and presented alternative suppliers for the order which can be accepted directly within the dashboard.

Based on Cameron's previous activity, NetSuite has allocated inventory. Using natural language inputs, Cameron can ask NetSuite to prioritize inventory allocation to those affected by the delay and to produce an email explaining the situation.

Cameron is also shown using NetSuite's AI to produce a job posting, complete with a description and hiring justification (complete with graph) for his higher-ups.

After sending the post off for approval, Cameron can also check candidates that have been sorted in order of compatibility for the role using generative AI. In the same window, he can generate email responses to all the candidates.

We're shown a different scenario in which NetSuite's AI explains and visualizes a cash risk for a CFO named Parker.

He can see the cause - Finley's sales campaign, which is going to cause a spike in customer demand that will harshly precede customer payments. Within the suite, Parker can simulate the outcome of paying one of the vendors at 60 days rather than 30 days to alleviate the issue.

Goldberg says many of the capabilities we've been shown are being worked on by hundreds of people, and that these will be brought to life by NetSuite's AI partner, Cohere.

Here to explain more is Martin Kon, president and COO at Cohere. He's starting by talking about the company's founding story, with co-founder Aidan Gomez having been an author on the paper that coined the term 'transformer' and led the way on generative AI.

Kon moved to Cohere earlier in 2023, having previously worked at YouTube as CFO. He says the company's generative AI work is groundbreaking.

"In terms of the interactions between humans and computers, this is the biggest change between - certainly - the smartphone, and I would say the Mosaic browser."

Kon says that the enterprise potential with generative AI is huge, despite the focus thus far having been largely on consumer apps like ChatGPT.

Before NetSuite, Kon says Cohere has a "hodgepodge" of apps through its growth. The firm has raised $150 million and has grown 89% in a short span of time.

"We're already excited about Planning and Budgeting, how we're quickening our close, how we do analytics and reporting," says Kon.

"NetSuite can grow with us, and we're really excited about that."

Kon is laying out the differences between various AI models, such as lexical search versus transformers. Combined, these can be used to draw context from natural language, and to power both generation and search functions.

Cohere is working on a number of these areas, including the burgeoning field of retrieval augmented generation, with a number of the leading names in this industry working at Cohere.

Retrieval augmented generation allows developers to ground models in data such as a customer's NetSuite data, which reduces hallucinations and enables users to access up-to-date data, with citations.

Kon says embeddings are an exciting area going forward, and that they will be key to levraging the technology while maintaining Cohere, Oracle, and NetSuite's core focus on data security.

Cohere is also committed to cloud agnosticism, allowing customers to use data from across their environment while keeping it where is sits and ensuring it is not leaked.

Generative AI is very demanding on compute, and the cost of deployment is a concern that will have to be addressed going forward, says Kon.

Goldberg acknowledges this, and the pair note that Oracle's supercluster approach to AI will help manage this strain for customers.

Going forward, Kon says that we can inform our actions based on the mistakes of the cloud era. Some firms spent too long analyzing the potential routes, while others just picked a route and started down it with the goal of picking up experience along the way.

It's this second approach that Kon says he admires in both NetSuite and Cohere's response to AI.

"Starting with something that you do now at scale, in production, learning how to do this in your data environment, that's what can separate the winners and the losers."

In a nod to NetSuite's 25th birthday, Kon says that this is a mirror of the cloud approach that NetSuite pioneered in 1998.

In a final "crazy deals" segment, Goldberg has advertised a raft of deals and employees have scattered 'SuiteUp' bucks around the hall.

We're finishing by giving EvanGPT one final chance.

The chatbot has urged attendees to stop by the demo floor - no more hallucinations or mentions of Salesforce.

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of SuiteWorld 2023. This morning's product keynote is titled 'Unleash the Suite', and will focus on innovations such as AI and improved user experience, and how these can help customers make intelligent business decisions.

It's just one hour until we'll hear from Gary Wiessinger, SVP NetSuite application development, as well as a number of product experts from the firm, who will lay out a vision for the future of the suite.

Stay tuned for all the latest as it develops.

The hall has a decidedly... aquatic theme this morning. Perhaps we'll hear more on this soon. The keynote begins in just five minutes.

As the hall fills up, we're being treated to "Around the World" by Daft Punk - the fish on the screens are hopping in tune.

And we're off, with a short humorous video showing Gary Wiessinger, SVP NetSuite application development, flashing back to 1998 in another 25th anniversary celebration. 

Wiessinger has been time-warped to a "world devoid of NetSuite, where companies don't have a way to become more productive, save money, and still achieve growth."

Time travel fun, complete with Evan Goldberg in a wig.

And with that, Wiessinger takes to the stage to explore the theme 'Unleash the Suite'.

Wiessinger says NetSuite now has more than 3,300 people working on its product, who have helped deliver 20 new modules in the past year. The growth has been necessary, with customer sales transactions up 20% year on year, and customer searches now at one trillion per day. 

"There are hundreds of unicorns running NetSuite. The hottest investment right now is generative AI, and more than 50% of venture AI startups are running NetSuite."

Wiessinger will explore NetSuite's advantage in three categories: Experience, AI, and Suiteness.

Wiessinger is going into more detail on 'doing more with less', first set out by NetSuite EVP and founder Evan Goldberg yesterday.

It's not just about efficiency gains, he says, but being proactive.

"We don't only answer questions you ask, we're answering questions you didn't know that you needed to ask. We don't only help you solve problems you're aware of, we're identifying problems before you do. And we don't only help you take actions you want to, we proactively suggest actions to take."

Wiessinger says that the UI redesign that NetSuite has committed to, which is based on Oracle Redwood design, will help customers in all areas.

We're onto AI now, with Wiessinger stating that NetSuite has 80 different features and solutions that use AI currently in development, and that there will be more detail on this later.

He acknowledges that there's been a huge hype curve for AI, but that NetSuite is well-positioned to deliver for you. The answer, he says, is "Suiteness".

Suiteness is our third category for today, and a returning theme from last year's conference. It's a term that relates to the full-suite capabilities of NetSuite, and the gains the firm says are only possible with a system that combines data across departments instead of separating them into siloes.

There are over 2,000 connections across NetSuite's full suite, which Wiessinger says helps employees work better together and empower firms to adopt new solutions in the most effective way.

"AI is a subset of the broad field of data science. Data science, unsurprisingly, is all about the data, and NetSuite has the data for your whole business," Wiessinger says.

"With that data, NetSuite can leverage AI in more powerful ways than point solutions can."

As an example, Wiessinger talks about Benchmark 360, NetSuite's new product that allows firms to compare their metrics against competitors using all of their data.

He also highlights Customer 360 and Intelligent Cash Management, which leverage AI to help customers obtain insight into their entire customer relationship and inventory. It's capable of producing detailed projections, and recommending steps for optimization.

In the same way, Intelligent Cash Management can create accurate and insightful cashflow predictions, and even produce recommendations for hiring plans or product promotion.

Here to talk about practical AI uses is Allison Auclair, GVP product management and commerce. Auclair says that AI can help deliver customer experiences that customers didn't even know they wanted.

"There's nothing worse than an experience that seems like it's personalized, but it just misses the mark because you don't have enough information."

To show how NetSuite is fixing this concern with AI, we're being shown another demo featuring the fictional firm Wyra.

NetSuite's upcoming AI features within CRM, SuiteCommerce, CPQ, and SuiteBilling can provide product recommendations including the exact configuration.

In another future-facing demonstration, we're shown an example in which Customer 360 and generative AI flag a customer opportunity, automatically creates a quote, and launches a configurator with the customer's choices already preselected. The system can automatically recommend a discount that meets the customer's budget, to ensure maximum profit at the same time as customer satisfaction.

Next, we're looking at how AI and suiteness can help customers to create and deliver products and services.

"We know that when you're better connected as a business, you can be smarter and more agile in response to those disruptions.

NetSuite is bringing limited licences to NetSuite Warehouse Management, which will boost employee access to NetSuite by giving them access to only the specific functions they need and without the need for a full subscription.

In Supply 360, production managers can see a visual overview for potential manufacturing issues.

Auclair says that revenue impact can be broken down by component, to help managers prioritize their actions. She says it's a great display of suiteness, as the AI system can draw data from across a customer environment to give context on the revenue and time to delivery impacts of any decision, which can be used to give suggested steps.

More detail now on Field Service, a product announced yesterday that gives field technicians a purpose-built app for tracking their schedules and team, and allows managers to track their workers in the field with service analytics and maintenance scheduling.

When a manager goes to schedule a job, they can see a map with a list of available technicians projected against their schedules to ensure they can quickly hire the right people for the job.

The field technician will subsequently receive a notification offering them the job and real-time directions to the site where the job is taking place. The app will automatically record the time and warranty for the job.

Technicians can also track the materials they used through the app, and fill in an e-signature for the job through the app. Auclair says this will ensure smooth delivery of services, and reduce dispiutes.

We're moving onto hiring and empowering employees through NetSuite, and here to explain more is Hanif Ismail, VP product management, HCM.

Ismail says AI can "dramatically" improve productivity, and help address workforce challenges in the US especially.

To illustrate his point, we're being shown a demo of Workforce Management. Through the dashboard, a CFO can see that a specific site is over its budget due to unexpected overtime. He can then reach out to the site manager, who can build a schedule in the dashboard with employees color-coded by availability, cost, with a live count of whether the schedule is in budget.

The manager can also assign an open contract to a job, and go through employee responses to see which ones will keep the cost within budget.

We're now being shown "the future" of autonomous payroll, another future-facing AI assistant.

The AI bot can automatically reach out to leaders with anomalies it has detected based on historical data. In the example, it has found employees whose overtime was never approved by their managers, and recommends the leader manually approves the payments because it is aware both of the relevant managers are on paid time off.

In another example, the AI assistant is able to recommend specific product strategies from a catalog in order to meet a custom revenue goal.

It's time to move onto optimizing profits and budgets, and we're being joined by Craig Sullivan, GVP product management international, to give us the full picture.

He says this is the moment "we've all been waiting for", to laughs from the crowd.

Sullivan is digging into detail on Enterprise Performance Management, with a demo in which a financial manager can look at the performance of a specific subsidiary, and then use Planning and Budgeting to see intelligent predictions broken down by product line.

The generative AI can produce a visualization for the projection, and the user can set new baselines for forecasts going forward to track changes.

Sullivan says that since last year, customers have benefitted from AP Automation, and he's excited that this year NetSuite has announced Bill Capture as a standalone product to help more customers onto that automation journey.

He's showing us a demo in which a manager can procure devices for a new hire through SuiteProcurement. NetSuite will then compare this to the budget and approval limit for these items. 

Later, on the manager dashboard, the manager can confirm the order and have it automatically paid through the system.

We're returning to an example from yesterday, in which Cash Management flags a potential cash risk based on customer demand.

Instead of moving the payment dates to suppliers, as shown in yesterday's keynote, Sullivan takes us through alternatives recommended by the AI assistant, such as offering customers an alternative product. This will then trigger a comprehensive projection for where this places the firm - in this case, firmly back into the green.

Sullivan says there's lots to be excited about, and quips "if you can't make taxes exciting, you can certainly make them easier".

That's just what NetSuite has aimed to do with its new tax compliance localization for Brazil, announced yesterday. On the topic of localization, Sullivan also highlights new announcements for Spanish NetSuite customers, with both Customer Success and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse now available across the region.

Wiessinger is back on stage, with a promise to do more than just help customers optimize their processes.

"Craig showed you some of what we're doing to help specific countries, and I want to tell you more about what we're doing for your industries."

He says NetSuite has created additions for 14 verticals, and that these will now cater to companies offering hybrid services across various verticals.

Wiessinger says he is excited to announce new additions for healthcare, restaurants, and hospitality.

Starting with healthcare, in which NetSuite already has 2,200 customers, NetSuite is committed to delivering a wide range of value streams.

To give one example, Wiessinger is taking us through the new Compliance 360 dashboard. This uses AI to analyze anomalous activity such as an employee printing patient data, which can be problematic.

Alerts can be flagged to follow up on, and the system provides a visualization of key performance indicators for anything that could affect compliance, such as printing, users deleting records, or which patients have had the most records pulled.

Onto restaurants and hospitality, Wiessinger says NetSuite is committed to serving these industries "through the supply chain to the back office".

More on benchmark 360 here, with a demo looking at how the dashboard makes accessing KPIs easy. Users can compare themselves with anonymized competitors, and leverage actionable insights to see areas in which they could improve.

Wiessinger says NetSuite will continue to delve into technological innovations, and here to talk more about this is Ryan Grisso, SVP, product engineering.

"An elite team of hackers has targeted SuiteWorld. Wipe your devices, change your passwords, implement four-factor authentication as a minimum," he starts.

"False alarm people," he adds, and uses this as a segue for NetSuite's Hackathon for Good. This year, it's helped Capital Area foodbank, a non-profit in DC.

Now back onto the product details. Grisso says innovations have been announced across application, infrastructure, and development, as well as AI services and Oracle  hardware.

NetSuite's cloud lives inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and today more than 90% of NetSuite customers are running in OCI. Grisso reaffirms an announcement from yesterday: by 2024, that number will be 100%.

NetSuite now has 28 data centers around the world, having added two more in Canada this year to serve 3,000 customers.

Moving onto generative AI, Grisso announces NetSuite Prompt Studio, which will "let administrators put their hands directly on the controls of generative AI".

The aim for Prompt Studio is to help users avoid unwanted outputs, and help teach them how to get the best outputs with every prompt.

"They can provide as much or as little guidance as they require, and they can shape the output as needed for each individual use case. It's available everywhere text generation is enabled."

We're hearing even more on NetSuite Analytics Warehouse now, which Grisso says helps business leaders to generate "meaningful data storytelling for action".

We're being shown a demo in which a user creates a revenue model, and is given suggested visualizations based on this.

Grisso also expands on NetSuite's vision for generative AI for developers.  

"In our vision, an AI assistant offers developers contextualized assistance during all phases of the development cycle."

We're seeing another Wyra example again, in which the CEO sends a Jira ticket to a developer. It contains a request for an omni-channel marketing campaign in which first-time buyers are sent a discount email.

The text of the ticket can directly be used as the input, but Grisso says the CEO could just have easily used a Word document or email. Based on this, NetSuite AI generates code as a starting point for the developer, Polly.

As Polly combs through the code she is given recommendations for changes to the code. At all times, she has control over whether AI suggestions are applied, and at any time she can ask the AI to explain a section of the code.

Wiessinger is now back on stage to round out the keynote. "Unleashing the Suite is about NetSuite, but it’s also about you," he says, and expresses hope that yesterday and today have shed light on how customers can unlock value through the suite.

And with that, the day-two keynote is finished! We'll be bringing you even more coverage from SuiteWorld 2023 throughout the week.

It’s been 25 years since NetSuite was founded and paved the way for cloud computing in finance. To mark its quarter-century, NetSuite is bringing its annual conference to sunny Las Vegas, now under the harsh gaze of the Sphere. In this massive LED attraction, one can find an unlikely parallel, for as it shines gaudily over Caesars Forum, so too does the glitzy prospect of generative AI loom over SuiteWorld’s conference agenda.

‘Full Suite Ahead’ was the tagline for SuiteWorld 2022 and encapsulated NetSuite’s insistence that only by adopting its entire portfolio could customers realize the benefits of its end-to-end approach. 

This includes consolidating suite and app data in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse or for context-based automation.

The day-two keynote saw the firm grace the English language with ‘Suiteness’ – used to describe NetSuite’s ability to combine this holistic approach with automation to give customers better contextual controls and intelligent data sorting. This year, we’ll see it endeavor to add ‘SuiteUP’ and ‘Unleash the Suite’ to our vocabularies, if the keynote previews are anything to go by.

What to expect from SuiteWorld 2023

NetSuite is headlining SuiteWorld 2023 with ‘SuiteUP’, which promises “advanced AI integrated at every turn”. But what does this mean? ‘SuiteUP’ will, we imagine, focus on the brand-new tools NetSuite can give businesses to boost productivity and cut costs.

References to “more automation” alongside its ‘Unleash the Suite’ tagline, could hint at a more conservative approach to AI, however. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Continued focus on NetSuite’s end-to-end automation and wider portfolio may be the headline at SuiteWorld 2023 — with generative AI brought on in a more limited capacity.

It’s an approach that could pay off, and one NetSuite’s core customers would appreciate. Rather than playing into generative AI hype, a considered approach alongside meaningful improvements to the firm’s ‘full suite’ offering could go down well with attendees and investors alike. 

NetSuite has strived for the past five years to become a ubiquitous global financial solution. In its London conference this year, it laid out aims to ‘act global, be local’ – a reference to its ongoing efforts to provide the most effective region-specific services on tax and data compliance. 

Fashionably late on generative AI?

There hasn’t been a big tech keynote in 2023 that hasn’t at least acknowledged generative AI, with many introducing generative AI tools to remain competitive. It would be surprising if SuiteWorld doesn't follow the same trend; the likelihood of Evan Goldberg saying “ChatGPT” or “generative AI” is high.

This isn’t to say AI is new to NetSuite, as the firm would quickly remind any detractors. NetSuite has been using the technology for many years, and some of the most prominent announcements last year were rooted in machine learning (ML) and AI capabilities.

Take AP Automation, NetSuite’s answer to the tedium of manually processing vendor bills. The system uses AI and ML to populate NetSuite AP forms with text and field info pulled directly from bills, and to run its ‘intelligent rules engine’ which flags payment discrepancies.

But while automation and rules-based AI are at the forefront of the company’s services, generative AI and its massive workloads are a different thing entirely. The difference between ripping text from a document and generating a document from scratch based on natural language prompts - one of the simplest functions for large language models (LLM) is vast, to say the least.

How much will Oracle lock-in matter?

Inevitably, Oracle will set NetSuite’s pace and ambition on generative AI, and for the first half of the year, its parent company lagged behind on AI investment. But in June, it announced expansive generative AI services available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which it claims can offer the fastest and most competitively-priced GPU clusters for training AI models.

Oracle fleshed out its plans at CloudWorld 2023, with CTO and chairman Larry Ellison hailing generative AI as transformative and arguing its use in healthcare is among the most important things Oracle is doing.

Any generative AI models, products, or tools NetSuite announces will almost certainly run on OCI, and it will be incumbent on Oracle to explain the benefits to its customers. This also means the conference could become a crossroads for NetSuite customers, who may need to choose between its ‘full suite’ approach and Oracle’s AI strategy, over that of competitors such as Salesforce.

If NetSuite attempts to introduce generative AI within financial software, it will also need to address ‘hallucinations’, the term for confidently incorrect outputs from AI models.

In light of this, it could be that in the short term, the company introduces generative AI into less critical areas of its systems, or forces human oversight to ensure potentially unwanted outputs don’t tarnish critical financial reports.

Caution could be NetSuite’s secret weapon this year. As other firms tie themselves in knots to pepper their products with generative AI, NetSuite could stand out by doing the reverse. Instead, we expect the firm to apply the technology in moderation while doubling down on improving end-to-end automation and analytics.

ITPro's Rory Bathgate will be covering SuiteWorld 2023 live from Caesars Forum, Las Vegas between 16 – 19 October. To stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements from the conference, follow our live blog and subscribe to our newsletter below.

Tech giant Oracle has unveiled yet more updates to its My Experience (ME) platform that sits within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). 

Dubbed Oracle Celebrate, it does exactly what it says on the tin and is designed to ensure managers and decision-makers can not only more effectively recognize and reward employees, but also be able to better track insight and actions around these key themes. 

A business’ success is very reliant on its employees so it’s important to ensure a sense of being appreciated and valued, or risk losing good people and experiencing productivity declines, according to Yvette Cameron, senior vice president of product strategy at Oracle Cloud HCM. 

“In the last year [or so], Oracle announced GROW, an AI-driven platform that brings together everything you need to be successful,” Cameron told ITPro.

"Now with Celebrate, we're really bringing forward the opportunity for organizations to develop and support that culture of appreciation, as well as recognition of what matters for the business.

“What makes Oracle so different from the probably hundreds of reward and recognition programs in the market, [is] that this is truly part of a unified and complete cloud HCM suite.” 

Oracle is aiming to provide a more personalized and meaningful experience for employees. 

Oracle Celebrate aims to remove informational siloes to ensure better data cohesiveness and deliver more accurate insights about what is and isn’t working within any given business. 

Specifically, Oracle Celebrate offers:

• Peer-to-peer recognition, which ensures everyone - whether peers or managers - can celebrate success. It’s about celebrating the small as well as the big ‘win’ moments. 
• A Generative AI assistant, which generates recommendations relating to improvements regarding peer-to-peer recognition. 
• Nomination and event-based awards to acknowledge and celebrate everything from work anniversaries and promotions to everything in between and more. 
• Redeemable points that allow employees to derive value in a similar way to many retail loyalty schemes, but based on what matters to them. 
• A recognition insights dashboard to help managers better understand, digest, and action insights. 
• Real-time recognition and engagement data, which enables continuous monitoring of recognition programs. 
• A recognition-based social feed designed to provide a real-time stream that celebrates success. 

“From the users’ perspective [it’s about] making it completely frictionless to recognize and share that appreciation for others or celebrate successes. And doing that by introducing this opportunity - through nudges and prompts - in a widget-type form that can be embedded anywhere throughout the application, so that you can recognize where it matters,” Cameron adds. 

“It’s also about making it easier for users. Over the years, I think IT leaders and HR managers have fallen into this mindset of [thinking] ‘integration is easy in the cloud. We all know how to do it [so] let's just pop it in place and do it. Here's a bespoke tool for this process. Let's go.’ But the challenge is the fact you're creating silos. 

“You're propagating these multiple versions of the talent profile. In this system, because it's focused on rewards and recognition, you have this view of who this person is in their activities and what's valued and what's not.”

Oracle’s announcement has been well-received by industry experts such as Zachary Chertok, research manager for employee experience at research firm IDC, who said recognizing employees' efforts is one of the main modern methods organizations are trialing to improve employee success.

“Building an ecosystem for recognition helps source the roots of achievement, moving the needle on best practices as success happens, stimulating cultural acceptance around process innovation, and building belonging through community acknowledgment and appreciation,” he said.

By ensuring organizations have a better - and more holistic - view of how employees are doing and how their performance and success are being reported and recognized, firms can create a more supportive environment that results in happier employees, according to Cameron. 

There is a strong research base that supports the idea that happy employees remain with their employers longer, and are more loyal to them, often also showing greater levels of productivity and motivation.

“Too many organizations feel that the words happiness and work cannot be used together. Somehow it's not professional, it's not focused on outcomes,” Cameron added.  

“But what a great environment to have somewhere where people are happy and helping others be happy on their way to successful journeys.”

Oracle, which turned 46 this year, has thus far largely focused on helping businesses derive value and solve challenges through software such as databases, ERP, and – latterly – cloud. 

As demonstrated during the first full day of the tech giant’s annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas, however, it's setting its sights way beyond its legacy roots in B2B. 

That desire to solve challenges spans multiple industries, geographies and business sizes. Importantly, involves partners, too. 

Addressing the tens of thousands of delegates attending the event both in person and virtually, Oracle CEO Safra Catz was keen to start off on the right foot. 

“Between all of you and us, this is a truly stunning moment. For technology, for people and for doing things that many of us weren’t even sure were possible,” Catz said. 

“Today’s keynote is really focused on all of you. On teaching and learning and sharing. And showing what’s possible when you have the right technology and the right mindset. I think you’re going to learn a lot…  We’ve tried to reorientate our entire company around you. The fact you’re all in Las Vegas really means a lot to us. So thank you for everything.”

Generative AI gets top billing

It's perhaps no big surprise that AI was a big focus during the myriad sessions and keynotes put on by Oracle during the first day of the conference. 

In a video shown just before Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CTO and chairman’s entrance, there was talk of achieving:

• The greatest outcomes
• Building world-class experiences
• Finding effective treatments
• Improving efficiency
• Predicting customer demand

And the ability to do so across every industry and across every part of every business. 

“Oracle has been using AI for many years. But generative AI is different,” Ellison said. 

In a dedicated AI press session, several company executives talked about Oracle’s USP in this space. A common theme was the ability to view things holistically setting the firm apart from competitors. But also ensuring differentiation under than overarching umbrella. 

Healthcare has been – and will continue to be – a big focus for Oracle and its ecosystem. Indeed, Ellison described the work the firm is doing here, particularly in relation to the new Cerner HealtheIntent efforts, as so critical that he said he wasn’t “sure there's anything more important we're working on at Oracle than this".

Oracle acquired Cerner in late 2021 and much work has been done since then to ensure the clout of the new parent organization is fully utilized.

“Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information, enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes,” Ellison said at the time. 

 “With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications. This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs.”

Generative AI isn't just a fad

That wasn’t just lip service as ITPro discovered during a press session today with Travis Dalton, executive vice president and general manager of  Oracle Health

“As an EMR provider we were able to tackle a third of the problem set. But with Oracle we can tackle [more],” he said. 

“We are transforming our business. As Cerner, we were becoming a services business. As [part of] Oracle we have got the opportunity not to just serve clients better but [ensure]] health of the business is better. The margin profile has upped materially. So we can create margin space to invest in the products and services we need.”

When asked whether Oracle was simply jumping on the bandwagon when it comes to generative AI, Dalton disagreed, saying: “We’re definitely not riding the wave. We’ve been fairly quiet compared to our competitors. I’ve been in code reviews with Larry personally. The market demand is high. No one is saying ‘give me some AI.’ The demand is ‘My clinicians are tired, irritated and angry and in their pajamas doing notes, wasting time and missing their kids' ball games’.

“You’re going to fix it with true technology like ambient listening, generative AI, using LLMs.”

Oracle and Microsoft have announced a new service that will allow customers to access Oracle database servers located in Microsoft Azure data centers.

Intended to smoothen the cloud transition and give customers more flexibility when it comes to managing their multi-cloud environment, Oracle said that its existing customers could benefit from Azure without having to unlearn Oracle tools and processes.

The service will see Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) hosted for the first time in Azure data centers, widening the availability of Oracle’s various product offerings and bringing in new benefits such as the low latency of Azure.

Customers will be able to purchase Oracle Database@Azure through the Azure Marketplace, and deploy the service using developer tools such as Azure application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kids (SDKs).

Complex purchasing processes were identified by Oracle and Microsoft as one of the biggest challenges customers face when it comes to adopting multi-cloud architectures, and it hopes that having the service on the Azure Marketplace will mitigate this.

They also identified disjointed management and siloed tools as two of the other major pain points for customers - factors addressed by the service’s “fully integrated experience” within the Azure portal.

“As we continue our digital transformation through innovation and technology, interoperability across cloud service providers to enable safe, secure, and rapid financial transactions for our 40 million customers is paramount,” said Mihir Shah, enterprise head of data, Fidelity Investments. 

“Today’s announcement displays how industry leaders Microsoft and Oracle are putting their customers’ interests first and providing a collaborative solution that enables organizations like Fidelity to deliver best-in-class experiences for our customers and meet the substantial compliance and regulatory requirements with minimal downtime.”

In the past year, CIOs have expressed concern that cloud complexity exceeds human ability, with IT teams unable to process data efficiently due to massive overburdening and lack of understanding of their cloud environment.

Bringing together the Oracle and Azure tools could allow customers to choose the approach that best fits their needs.

Oracle will operate the services, which are set to launch in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany initially.

In a live stream on the announcement, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the new service is the product of a lengthy collaboration between the two firms, and that it would allow customers to better reap the benefits of their data.

“Everyone’s very excited about the cloud, we’ve been talking about it for a long time, but actually a majority of the data has not migrated from on-premise into the cloud as yet,” said Ellison.

“But it will, and we're trying to hasten that process to make it easier for customers to actually move their entire data center workload to the cloud. And that means moving all those Oracle databases which are currently on-premise into the cloud, for everything to coexist and be easily managed even though some of this technology is Oracle's technology, some of the technology is Microsoft’s Technology, to allow you to seamlessly manage that infrastructure that's a multi-cloud, multi-provider infrastructure.

“To be able to do that in a convenient secure reliable way, that's what we're trying to accomplish with this partnership.”

Nadella argued that the inclusion of Oracle Database in Azure was also well-timed for the rising interest in and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Generative AI models in particular hinge on the careful organization of massive amounts of data.

“When I look at anything that you do around AI you need to have access to data, and so to have now Oracle Database in Azure means we can take something like Azure OpenAI, and take it to where the data is. 

“So whether it is fine-tuning a model, pre-training a model, or meta prompting a model [it] requires that low latency access to data and so we are very very excited. This is the moment where data and AI come together to transform data businesses and business processes, it couldn’t be a more profound timing of these two things.”

Lambeth is London’s largest inner-city borough and its council employs 3,000 staff who work to provide more than 800 kinds of public services to the more than 345,000 people who live in the area. 

Over the last decade, Lambeth London Borough Council has faced the same challenges most local authorities in the UK had faced: the need to provide a wide range of services while sustaining massive budget cuts.

To cut costs and unlock data silos, the council set out to simplify and standardize its disconnected systems, while incorporating smarter tools into workflows. 

Lambeth Council invested pretty heavily in Oracle’s cloud services to run its back-office infrastructure, adopting Oracle Cloud across finance, procurement, human resources (HR), recruiting, projects, and payroll. In addition to these, it uses Oracle Enterprise Planning and Management (PBCS). 

Having traditionally run its infrastructure on-premises, Lambeth Council hoped such a migration could improve decision-making, cut costs, and free up resources so staff can better focus on delivery.

Choosing cloud continuity

The move to Oracle Cloud was a natural one, given Lambeth Council’s long history with the company. “We have been an Oracle customer since 2000 and over the years have considered a range of options, including SAP, Workday and Microsoft Dynamics, before renewing licenses for Oracle,” explains Hamant Bharadia, strategic director of finance and investments.

But that, like many local authorities at the time, was within an on-premise setup. “The decision to move to the cloud was taken about six years ago; the council started implementing it during 2017 and went live with it in April.” 

The implementation was part of a wider cloud-first approach that Lambeth had adopted, primarily for economic reasons as Bharadia explains. “Emerging from the austerity measures imposed by the UK central government, we had to deliver cost savings. To achieve this, we reduced the size of our office accommodation as well as implementing a more flexible working environment, and increased software accessibility.”

But wasn’t the sole reason for Lambeth Council’s drive to the cloud. The other consideration in the move to the cloud was the ease of use of the standard software and workflow designs, without the need for any customizations. This reduces ongoing maintenance costs as well as the costs and timescales for future upgrades and enhancements, says Bharadia.

Both cloud-first and flexibility-first

What the switch to Oracle Cloud has given Lambeth Council is a good deal more flexibility in the way it works. This has enabled the organization to reduce its office space from 14 buildings to just two.

“The ability for employees to access Oracle’s cloud applications from any location has made it much easier for them to work from home,” says Bharadia. “Flexible working is also helping us to serve the community’s needs more effectively. During the pandemic, a combination of remote and mobile working enabled us to deliver lockdown support to residents more easily, for example, helping us to run vaccination centers and food hubs.”

A move of this magnitude can often cause issues, but the authority has found it’s had little impact on the way Lambeth operates and, as Bharadia points out, it’s improved many functions.

“The move has been well received,” he says. “Firstly, the technology is easier for staff to use, thanks to the increased process automation – including annual leave booking, objective setting, performance reviews, and online payslips. Managers can also easily review and update their monthly budget monitoring and forecasting, including roll-ups and dashboard.

“The council has been able to provide access to external suppliers for self-service,” he adds. 

“In its HR function, with more self-service capabilities, we have seen a 55% improvement in appraisal and performance reporting, allowing the HR team to allocate fewer resources to share a greater workload.” 

Oracle has waded into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code furor in a stunning turn of events, claiming it’s “committed to Linux freedom”. 

Oracle’s words will doubtless cause users who remember OpenSolaris to raise an eyebrow or two. Organizations dealing with the pain arising from Oracle’s changes around Java licensing – the introduction of the Java SE Universal Subscription – will also be taken aback by the company’s championing of open and free principles. 

Still, as far as Linux is concerned, Oracle’s intervention comes in the form of a blog post headlined “Keep Linux Open and Free”. It’s reaffirmed, over the last quarter of a century, its goal has been to “help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it”. 

In fact, Oracle’s principal goal over the last 25 years has been driving shareholder value. Oracle Linux – itself derived from RHEL – exists only to drive revenues. Furthermore, seeing the words “low-cost” and “Oracle” in the same paragraph will come as a novelty to users faced with calculating the cost of their licenses. 

Like other RHEL-compatible distributions, such as Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, Oracle Linux has been affected by Red Hat’s decision to stop publicly releasing the RHEL source code.  

While both the former distributions have devised ways to remain compatible, Oracle has cast doubt on where its own distribution stands, saying Oracle Linux “will continue to be RHEL-compatible to the extent we can make it so”. It also warned after version 9.2, there may be “a greater chance for compatibility issues to arise”. 

Paying developers and supporting coders 

Oracle was quick to blame Red Hat’s owner, IBM, for the current debacle and pointed out the excuse for not releasing source code – somebody has to pay RHEL developers – did not really hold water. After all, Red Hat had managed to do so for many years before IBM’s $34 billion acquisition. 

However, Oracle has a chequered history when it comes to supporting developers and it’s difficult not to consider the company’s behavior with regard to Java.

In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and, over the following decade, introduced paid licensing options. In 2019 it declared that security updates for Java 8 couldn’t be downloaded without a subscription. 

This year saw the firm introduce the controversial Oracle Java SE Universal Subscription. It could result in an organization having to purchase a license for the entire employee population, even if Java is only required for a single user or server.  

As such, Oracle’s critique, particularly the line about “more revenue opportunity for IBM”, is a little on the nose considering its own revenue-raising moves. One must also consider the fate of OpenSolaris. After it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the firm discontinued in-house development of the open source OpenSolaris operating system – although a fork, OpenIndiana, continued. Oracle instead focused its efforts on the proprietary Oracle Solaris. 

Oracle’s “Keep Linux Open and Free” line is all the more of an about-face. 

What about the competition? 

Alongside Oracle’s pronouncements, the veteran Linux distribution SUSE has thrown its chameleon into the ring. Unlike Oracle’s blustering, SUSE has come up with some concrete proposals: fork RHEL, maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution without restrictions, and invest $10 million into the project. 

SUSE introduced Liberty Linux last year, aimed at customers needing CentOS and RHEL support, but insisted it remained fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise, the Adaptable Linux Platform, and openSUSE. “Becoming more proprietary should not be the basis for competition between open source companies,” CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen said. 

SUSE’s move has been welcomed by Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, with Kurtzer saying SUSE “has embodied the core principles and spirit of open source”. He went on to commend the collaboration opportunities afforded by SUSE’s move. 

Oracle, on the other hand, has been quick to criticize IBM and Red Hat’s actions while painting itself as one of the custodians of Linux freedom. Developers who remember its history, and recent activities, will find the company’s newfound fervor around open source operating systems hard to take. 

Customers wondering where to go next for their RHEL-compatible needs must also pay attention to the lack of detail in Oracle’s post beyond the fact its software will continue to be developed and tested on Oracle Linux, not RHEL. 

Oracle has warned that compatibility issues might arise, but it’s also laid the blame for problems at the door of IBM and Red Hat. And, of course, its own software will carry on working anyway. Regardless of how noble Oracle’s intervention may be, it will always have its own revenues to worry about.