Oracle can do for AI what it did for cloud –

and CloudWorld 2024 is its chance to show that

If leveraged right, Oracle’s trusted cloud credentials could give it an edge in the constantly shifting tech landscape

The company has survived several decades of technical advancements, such as the introduction of cloud computing and the more recent surge in generative AI.

To be fair, Oracle hasn’t always embraced the newest trends at the first opportunity.

The reason for the company’s persistent lack of market share compared to the “big three” is that it entered the cloud computing industry much later than Microsoft, AWS, and Google.

Oracle has been relevant since 1977, and its flagship event, Oracle CloudWorld, in 2024, will be an opportunity to continue the trend even though slow and steady doesn’t always win the race.

The catchphrase for Oracle’s relevance was coined by Doug Kehring, EVP of corporate operations at the company, during its earlier this year Oracle CloudWorld tour stop in London.

Kehring claims that Oracle wants to use generative AI in a real and practical way, shunning the hype around the technology and focusing instead on how to create value for the company’s bottom line.

He clarified at the time that Oracle‘s objective is to create the “most comprehensive end-to-end suite of technologies to assist any company in any industry in automating their operations.” “We don’t create gaming systems, we don’t sell consumer goods, and we definitely don’t write school papers for your kids,” he said.

The company will have the chance to highlight this objective even more at Oracle CloudWorld 2024 and show its business clients that, despite not releasing the newest AI tools, it is still undoubtedly one of the most reputable suppliers of cloud and AI capabilities.

AI for the enterprise

On its CloudWorld tour, Oracle announced a whole suite of new AI features built into Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite serving functions across finance, sales, marketing, HR, supply chain, and customer service.

With the enterprise as its point of focus, these tools were built to assist users in business-related tasks such as project proposal generation, strategy ideation, or content summarization.

A practical approach to AI has been part of Oracle’s game plan for some time, with Gartner analyst Chris Pang telling ITPro in 2023 that the firm is “radically practical” with its focus on autonomous databases.

Take the firm’s push on vector search, a method of deploying AI to search through large volumes of unstructured data that would otherwise be difficult to navigate.

Oracle released ‘Oracle Database 23ai’ earlier this year to address this need, by bringing AI algorithms directly into where unstructured data is located, rather than making enterprises shift datasets to use vector search.

Oracle’s trusted cloud

Another bow in Oracle’s quiver is the fundamental reliability of its cloud infrastructure. It may have been late to the cloud party, but it made up for lost time and now has a large portfolio of big-name customers in trust-essential industries.
The opening keynote of Oracle CloudWorld 2023, focused largely on customer success stories that spotlighted companies in high-risk sectors such as healthcare and banking.

This served to highlight Oracle’s reliable credentials for cloud services, which CEO Safra Catz further emphasized in talks with reliable leaders including Lori Goltermann, chief client officer and CEO of AON’s Regions and Enterprise Clients Group. Goltermann pointed out that Oracle had a crucial role in AON’s “quick, but deliberate” adoption of AI. AON specializes in risk mitigation for these high-risk industries.

The public sector also often looks to Oracle, such as London’s Lambeth Council which set out to cut costs and free up siloed data by using Oracle cloud solutions across HR, recruiting, and payroll.

Oracle will rely significantly on the confidence that they have built in the cloud across the public-private spectrum, according to delegates of CloudWorld 2024. Oracle prefers to work with the group of clients who will most profit from its enterprise-first solutions rather than the biggest number of clients.

Moreover, the current discussion about the sovereign cloud has led both governments and businesses to look for cloud service providers that have local data handling capabilities.
Richard Smith, the EVP of Technology for EMEA, said Oracle has been leading this discourse.

Oracle is well-positioned to meet those kinds of needs with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“We have a number of countries where we’re negotiating … sovereign regions with the national government,” Ellison said.
Ellison’s CloudWorld keynote, titled ‘Oracle Vision and Strategy’, is his moment to expand on this and explain where Oracle can deliver on this trend.

If Oracle can lean on the sense of reliability it has carefully crafted over its decades as an industry leader, it can take AI in its own direction in the same way it did with the cloud. Just like its approach on cloud, this will require a strong vision and the blessing of critical customers to succeed – and CloudWorld is its moment to showcase both.