It’s day two of Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, and we’re all set to hear more from the cloud giant.
Yesterday saw keynotes from CEO Safra Catz, who was joined by an all-star customer line-up including the likes of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Red Bull Racing’s Christian Horner. She was followed by Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison, who laid out his view of the future of cloud and healthcare.
This morning, it’s time to focus on products, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) taking the limelight in a keynote from OCI Executive Vice President Clay Magouyrk, before this afternoon’s session from Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications product development, who’ll be focusing on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.
We’re gearing up for this morning’s keynote with some much-needed coffee and pastries, before the action starts soon.
This is our first time at OCW, so we’re keen to hear from the company on all its latest news.
However this morning’s keynote will focus on Oracle’s customer successes, with the likes of Nvidia, DeutscheBank and Red Bull Racing taking to the stage.
And we’re in! This is a tech conference in Vegas, so there’s bass-heavy remixes of The Weeknd and more…Safra Catz incoming soon.
We’re running a little late here – the hall is at full capacity though, so hopefully we’ll be underway soon!
Here she is! Oracle CEO Safra Catz takes to the stage at Oracle Cloud World 2022.
“We’re finally here in real life – we’re no longer little squares on screen!” she declares.
“What we learned during the pandemic is that it is absolutely critical to have a digital conenction with your employees, your customers, your partners,” Catz adds.
“Being bold is the way to win – being timid could wipe you out.”
“We have built a platform that is the most secure, the most powerful, the most performant,” she notes.
“Our focus over the past few years has been to listen more closely to you, to make a prodct and a serivce we can deploy in multiple ways to make you successful.”
“We understand now that it’s not like the old days…now your success is absolutely central to everything we do.”
Our first guest for today is a big one – Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO and leather jacket aficianado.
Oracle and Nvidia have today refreshed their long-standing partnership, and will continue working together to accelerate development and improve workloads across a number of industries.
“These are incredible times,” Huang notes, “on one hand, we’re seeing the slowdown of traditional compute…making it harder for us to do our computing at an ever-decreasing cost, so we can do more.”
He adds that AI emergence is pushing demand, and all these new workloads will soon be accelerated. This will drive down costs and produce better efficiency – and increased capacity that can be used more for AI expansion and development.
Huang also notes how healthcare could see huge improvements and advances thanks to AI, with new treatments, cures and analysis soon available.
And with that, he’s off – with a hopeful message about how Nvidia and Oracle can work effectively together in the future – so here’s hoping it all comes off!
Next up is Gordon Mackechenie, CEO of Deutsche Bank, to talk about the challenges his company has faced during the pandemic and
“Demand for technology is always increasing in banking,” he notes, as more digital transactions take place, and new systems are required to faciliate this, driving demand for compute and storage.
Catz asks Mackechenie if he thinks the risk-averse nature of banking affects innovation, particularly in technology.
“A huge amount of innovation in banking today is data-driven,” he says, “it’s really important that we innovate to move forward.”
“This is an unbelievably exciting time…we’ve built an unbelievable partnership,” Catz says.
And now for something tastier – our next guest is Groupo Bimbo CTO Raul Obregon Servitje, talking about the company’s “total digital transformation” using Oracle services.
“We’ve stayed the course,” he notes, saying the company is committed to chasing growth, investing in brands, and using the data it generates to examine new opportunities.
Our next guest is Diane Scharwz, CEO of Johnson Controls, to talk about how her company became a “truly digital enterprise” over the last few years.
It has pivoted from being just a pure manufacturing company to becoming a truly “digital managed services” company, offering a full range of heating, cooling, fire and security systems.
It’s been an “inside-out” transformation, she notes – taking complexity and making it simple using a range of tech solutions.
And now another major gear change, as Safra Catz introduces from the Melissa & Doug toy company, CIO Mike Macrie, and Lee Tsukroff, CTO.
Designed to inspire real creativity without the need for screens, the company still needs technology systems to get its toys out to customers.
Next, it’s time to hear from one of the company’s biggest and most well-known partners, Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team principal Christian Horner
Since becoming the title sponsor of the team, Red Bull Racing has celebrated back-to-back driver championships in F1.
“As soon as we put the logo on the car, we started winning!” he notes. “We’re really pushing the boundaries – it’s been a great partnership so far.”
Red Bull Racing is using Oracle technology to help design and build its own engine in the world’s most demanding sport, having done that already with its own chassis design.
But the company is also using Oracle to help connect and engage with its fans as Formula 1 becomes ever more popular across the world.
“We want to interact and understand our fans to provide a better service and better interaction with them,” Horner notes.
Catz notes that she wants to take “at least some of the credit” for Red Bull Racing’s success though. “We’re never happy when we’re not number one,” she says.
And with that, it’s a wrap on this morning’s keynote. Catz thanks everyone for coming, and urges us to stick around for Larry Ellison’s session later today – that’s definitely not one to be missed, so stay tuned for more here on TechRadar Pro in a few hours’ time.
And we’re back! After a hearty lunch and some more caffeine, we’re ready for the afternoon keynote at Oracle Cloud World, hosted by none other than Larry Ellison himself.
Excitement (and crowds) are already building around the keynote theatre, so we’ll be sure to get there nice and early to see what the company’s founder has to say.
We’re running late here once again – seems Larry Ellison is the big draw this afternoon, with crowds still streaming in to the keynote hall.
We’re expecting to hear more about Oracle’s forward-looking strategy, outlook, and almost certainly a few curveballs as always.
There’s a mysterious single chair on the stage – what could it be for? Our money is on a ventriloquist’s act…
Well, we’re about to find out – the lights go down and the music goes up as we welcome Larry Ellison to the stage.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done this” he says, in a similar note to CEO Safra Catz in this morning’s keynote.
Ellison says he’s here to talk about two main things – open multi-cloud infrastructure, and complete end-to-end industry applications.
“Companies are already dealing with multiple providers and applications when buying infrastructure in the cloud,” he says. “The fact that this is happening is changing the behavior of technology providers.”
Service providers are now deploying new infrastructure services on multiple clouds, he notes – including Oracle MySQL Heatwave database, which now runs in AWS, Oracle and Azure.
But a better idea is connecting all the main clouds, so that customers have choices, Ellison notes – creating an “internet of clouds” or multicloud. Oracle working with Microsoft helped kick this off, he notes.
Ellison is making a big pitch for multicloud services here – or as he charmingly calls it, “an internet of clouds”.
“There should be an internet of clouds, the clouds should be interconnected, and you should mix and match between multiple clouds,” he says, “the garden walls come tumbling down.”
“The idea again, is providing customers with choices”
After a quick drink of water, Ellison moves on to next-generation applications – primarily in healthcare.
“What do I mean by next-generation?” he says, “We’re going to automate everything, end-to-end.”
Ellison outlines how currently there are “provider-centric healthcare services” – each hospital builds and operates its own information system – so it stays in their database.
“Sharing those records are very difficult – your health records are scattered across different databases, everyone you’ve visited in your entire life,” he says.
Providers, not patients, are being put at the center of the system he says – and that’s “a fundamental problem.”
Ellison and Oracle have a big goal – no less than a global public health analysis system – as well as a national (for the US) system.
“There’ll soon be a single place where you go to find out your healthcare records,” he says.
He also wants to build an engagement system to make it easier for patients, doctors and providers to communicate – no small task, but if anyone can, it could be Oracle.
Ellison admits that this is a hugely ambitious goal – “what we are trying to be done has never been tried before – so can it be done?”
“We know we can’t use the same set of tools to build these applications,” he says – it’s just too costly and time-consuming, plus the services need to be secure, resilient and easy to use.
“We need a completely new set of tools…we have to develop 10 times faster,” he adds, noting that Oracle did just that during the pandemic, building new tools for the CEC. But it will need partners, including the University of Oxford, CEC and a number of independent software companies.
Merging to make the new Oracle Cerner platform gives all the resources, experience and vision you need, Ellison says.
The Cerner deal wasn’t the catalyst, though – Ellison notes that the work was already underway.
Oracle worked with the CEC to build a vaccine management system at breakneck speed, using the latest versions of its platforms to ensure maximum efficiency and resiliency.
These helped provide a proven 10x productivity gain, Ellison says, and helped the company build its system in weeks, not the expected months.
Ellison is now outlining the next-generation apps that Oracle has already built with its partners, including the University of Oxford and AMD.
The company also helped spur on research to find a Covid vaccine, running over a hundred clinical trials, and signing up hundreds of thousands of participants.
Oracle already had a good track record with managing vaccines, rolling out yellow fever vaccines campaigns in Ghana.
The company also worked with the University of Oxford to build the Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS). Designed originally for tuberculosis, this was quickly adapted for Covid-19 to monitor genetic mutations, and deployed gloally to help governments across the world track the spread of the disease.
This change is vital, Ellison says, warning, “we’re going to bankrupt western civilziation” unless we can find a way to make healthcare cheaper.
“We’ve got to do a better job,” he declares.
Why is there a global financial database, but not a global healthcare one, Ellison asks.
If you have an accident abroad, the hospital will know your financial records, how much you make, but not if you’re allergic to penicillin.
This is the issue he, and Oracle, want to solve.
This is clearly an issue close to Ellison’s heart – we’re being walked through his exact motivations behind building a new national EHR database, and why this matters so much.
“We have to catch the next pandemic earlier,” he says.
Making it easier for patients to engage with their healthcare providers, carers and even governments is another area ripe for improvement, Ellison says.
The US Government v-safe platform, which used Oracle Autonomous Database, showed users are happy to voluntarily share some health data, and showed that it is safe to vaccinate groups of people such as pregnant women and younger children.
Now, we can use data from wearables and home diagnostic devices alongside information taken during check-ups, treatments, post-ops and more to boost such services even further.
Now on to Cerner.
Oracle acquired the company earlier this year, and it looks like it will play a huge role in its healthcare-focused future.
“We’re working with Cerner to take your existing medical interface and update it,” Ellison says.
“It seems like magic – but that’s just how things will be.”
“It’s not magic, it’s how all of our applications work,” Ellison concludes. “We’re absolutely committed to this mission.”
And with that – he’s off! A rather abrupt end to what was clearly a deeply personal topic for the Oracle founder, and certainly a keynote that was anything like what we expected.
So that’s it for day one of Oracle Open World, with two jam-packed keynotes wowing the crowds.
Thanks for staying with us today – join us tomorrow when there are two more keynotes, focusing more on the company’s product offerings, and hopefully several more surprises as well!
Good morning and welcome to day two of Oracle Cloud World!
After day one’s excitement and keynotes, we’re getting technical here this morning. First up is a keynote from Executive Vice President Clay Magouyrk focusing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Later, we’ll hear from Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications product development, who’ll talk us through Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.