Oracle OpenWorld 17

Oct 10 2017

Oracle adds AI development service to platform offerings

Oracle came late to the cloud and it’s been playing catch-up in recent years trying to add a wide range of services that customers are going to be demanding from a cloud vendor. To that end, the company added artificial intelligence as a service to its dance card today at Oracle OpenWorld.

The company has been busy today with a flurry of announcements including a new autonomous database as a service and a shiny new blockchain service. The artificial intelligence service is an extension of these announcements.

Artificial Intelligence has become table stakes for developers and they need a set of tools and technologies that make it relatively easy for them to tap into AI capabilities without requiring deep subject knowledge to make use of it.

Interestingly enough, the AI service being announced today is an extension of the tools the company has been using in-house to build AI-fueled applications for their own customers. The service is designed to give their customer a similar set of tools to build their own AI applications.

Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle adaptive intelligence, says the internal teams work with the internal developers in a kind of symbiotic relationship. “One thing is we try to push use cases as far as possible. The [internal development teams] give us technology and we also drive the technology. We are the biggest customer internally. We bring together those pieces so we can build [intelligent] apps,” he told TechCrunch.

Amit Zavery, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud says like blockchain, it’s about providing a set of services for customers, and giving them the tools to build apps on top of the service. He says this involves offering common frameworks, libraries and development tools around that and making them available as a platform service. The service lets developers use common tools like Google Tensorflow, Caffe or Neo4j, and runs on top of NVidia GPUs to provide the speed machine learning typically demands .

Zavery says Oracle is trying to make it easier for customers to build AI applications. “What we find with these frameworks and tooling, is that it’s not easy to set up as an integrated offering, and the evolution is happening so fast that it’s tough to keep up with what you should be using in terms of APIs around that.” The service is designed to alleviate those issues for developers.

In addition to the general AI development platform, the company is offering more specific offerings around chatbots, Internet of Things and adaptive intelligence apps that will all be available in the coming weeks.

Oct 10 2017

Cloud computing has demanded a kinder, gentler Oracle

Oracle has always had a swagger that reflects the public persona of its bombastic leader, Larry Ellison, but over the last several years, as the company has transitioned to the cloud, it has required a transformation to one that is softer and more customer-centric.

Mind you, this was a company that was the poster child for vendor lock-in the 90s and early 2000s. They knew you were looking for the best-of-breed enterprise database and their sales team knew how to get you hooked on costly maintenance contracts that kept you paying long after the initial sale and filled the company coffers. The cloud may not have completely killed off that model, but it has forced Oracle to play by a very different set of rules.

Of course, that didn’t stop the marketing machine from cranking up at Oracle OpenWorld this week, or Ellison himself from taking a few swings at chief cloud rival AWS (or them swiping back). But if you listened carefully to the messages coming from Oracle execs, there was clearly a shift in emphasis, which all revolved around the customer.

Interestingly enough, the company has been using its own internal users as a test bed for some of its cloud products. The new AI tools that were announced this week began as in-house tools to create the company’s new line of AI-driven applications. Jack Berkowitz, who is vice president of products and data science at Oracle adaptive intelligence, says his department’s job is to test the tools for the company and create applications that “reduce the time to value for customers.”

“Instead of hiring data scientists and data engineers and deployment specialists and system integrators, we provide those pre built to reduce time to deployment to days or weeks,” Berkowitz explained.

Even if Berkowitz and in-house team are demanding bunch, and they very likely are, it’s still not the same dynamic that Oracle faces with a subscribing cloud customer. As Salesforce vice chairman and COO Keith Block, who was once an Oracle executive, puts it, the subscription model puts the customer in control and it takes more than simply delivering a cloud product to put the focus on the customer’s needs.

“In the other companies who are in the perpetual license world — they can sell a lot of software up front and charge maintenance for it and you don’t get a lot of innovation for that and the risk is really on the customer, whereas in our model it is a ‘joint success model’,” Block told TechCrunch in an interview last year.

Oracle was born and raised in that perpetual license world, and while it’s made the shift to cloud services from a strictly on-prem approach, understanding the nuances of the cloud-subscription relationship could take a bit longer to understand (if they ever truly do).

While the cloud business is growing quickly — revenue from SaaS was up 62 percent in the most recent earnings report last month — it’s easier to grow a big number when you have a small percentage of the market. The cloud business provided a healthy $1.47 billion for the quarter, but that figure represented only a fraction of the company’s 9.21 billion overall revenue.

Oracle five year stock price snap shot. Chart: Yahoo Finance

The main focus of the company has clearly shifted to the cloud, but that is only part of the journey. The other is an attitude shift. Amit Zavery, senior vice president for cloud platform and middleware products at Oracle seems to sense this. When he described new offerings like the AI development tools and a new blockchain service announced this week at Oracle OpenWorld, he spoke of customer choice and of giving them the tools and technologies they want to use in the way they want to use them.

That sounds very much like a company making the shift toward the customer, but after years of working in an entirely different way, it’s a hard transformation to make. The market has demanded a kinder, gentler Oracle and it is trying to deliver. It remains to be seen if it can succeed.

Oct 10 2017

Oracle climbs on blockchain bandwagon with new cloud service

Oracle is working hard to be a SaaS vendor that matters, whether with its new autonomous database service or getting involved with blockchain. Today, the database giant announced a new blockchain service at Oracle OpenWorld that aims to give enterprise customers who want to get involved with the blockchain, a fully managed approach.

“There are not a lot of production-ready capabilities around Blockchain for the enterprise. There [hasn’t been] a fully end-to-end, distributed and secure blockchain as a service,” Amit Zavery, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud said.

The Oracle blockchain service is built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric project The company joined the Hyperledger project in August ahead of this announcement. Oracle joins IBM in building a blockchain cloud service on top of the Hyperledge Fabric project.

Zavery says the purpose of this service is to give those companies who are interested in the technology a running start by taking the base capabilities in the open source project, then adding security, confidential permissions and APIs to build blockchain applications on top of that. He says there is also transaction monitoring and processing under the covers.

Blockchain is the technology originally created to track bitcoin digital currency on the internet. The idea of a secure, distributed ledger has caught on with many business cases in verticals like real estate, insurance, government and healthcare.

“Blockchain is one of the hardest technologies that Silicon Valley-based companies have ignored. Most innovation had been happening in the rest of world,” Ray Wang founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research told TechCrunch.

He added, “Larry [Ellison] is heavily focused on cybersecurity at all levels and Oracle’s [blockchain] service focuses in on how to deliver secure transactions.”

Oracle is attempting to offer a wide variety of cloud services to compete more fully with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others who have a big head start in the cloud over Oracle. Over the last couple of years, the company has accelerated its cloud strategy and increase the number and type of services to its customers. This year’s OpenWorld is about building on all of that.