Key Takeaways From Oracle OpenWorld: AI, Security, ‘Cheap’ Cloud

Oracle took over a large section of downtown San Francisco Oct. 1-5 as it does every fall to stage its OpenWorld conference for 23,000 attendees. There was a lot of news this year, starting with the announcement of a virtual price war with Amazon Web Services for processing workloads in their respective clouds. Later, the world’s largest parallel database provider unveiled an entirely new security scheme run by robots along with a new blockchain cloud service. Keep reading eWEEK for the details; meanwhile, here’s a quick overview of the most important takeaways from OpenWorld.

CTO Larry Ellison spent a good portion of his opening keynote demonstrating how “cheap” Oracle’s in-cloud workload processing is versus Amazon Web Services’ RDS (relational database system). He explained in a series of demos that because Oracle’s cloud service is anywhere from six to 15 times faster that AWS in processing the same workload, Oracle thus is six to 15 times “cheaper” than AWS.

Oracle on Oct. 2 revealed new artificial intelligence-based apps for a phalanx of business applications. The new Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps are built into the existing Oracle Cloud Applications to provide useful AI-based modern business applications. Oracle claims that its Data Cloud, upon which the new AI runs, is the largest third-party data marketplace in the world, with a collection of more than 5 billion global consumer and business IDs and more than 7.5 trillion data points collected monthly.

Yes, even old-school Oracle is providing tools and cloud services for container-based systems. The Oracle Container Cloud Service (CCS), which officially launched at Oracle OpenWorld 2016, is based on technology originally built by StackEngine, which Oracle bought in 2015. Bob Quillin, who’s been with StackEngine all along, explained that Oracle now is putting a good investment in containers and Kubernetes with a focus on providing operational stability.

Oracle on Oct. 3 announced a new blockchain cloud service. The advanced, enterprise-grade distributed ledger cloud platform helps customers increase business velocity, create new revenue streams, and reduce cost and risk by securely extending ERP, supply chain, and other enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-premises applications to drive tamper-resistant transactions on a trusted business network. As part of Oracle Cloud Platform, Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is fully managed by Oracle and provides customers with rapid provisioning and simplified operations with built-in monitoring, continuous backup and point-in-time recovery.

Blockchain is transformative technology that has the potential to change the way enterprises, governments and consumers coordinate workflows and exchange data and assets. On Oct. 3 at Oracle OpenWorld, Intel announced that Oracle is using its processors to deliver a cloud-based blockchain service to its enterprise customers. Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service utilizes Xeon Scalable processors, which include a set of hardware-based features designed to enhance blockchain security and performance—particularly in cryptographic hashing.

Oracle announced at the show the availability of what it calls “the industry’s first cloud-native, intelligent security and management suite.” This new set of integrated suites—Oracle Identity Security Operations Center (SOC) portfolio of services and Oracle Management Cloud—is designed to help enterprises forecast, reduce, detect and resolve cyber-security threats and assist in efforts to remediate application and infrastructure performance issues.

Quest Software gathered its DevOps-relevant tools into a new package called the Toad DevOps Toolkit and debuted it at the conference. This tool suite is designed to help organizations automate database changes within their existing DevOps continuous integration-and-delivery processes. Using the Toad DevOps Toolkit, developers and DBAs can automate many of the critical database development functions within existing DevOps workflows without compromising quality, performance or reliability. The new release of Toad for Oracle 2017 R2 will accompany the toolkit when it debuts in October.

In a video interview, Steve Miranda, Oracle’s executive vice president in charge of all application and cloud development, offered eWEEK a high-level look at the most important messages and news coming from the conference this week. Normally, Oracle news revolves around its centerpiece, the database, and this year is no exception—except that more emphasis is now on making the applications around the database smarter and more autonomous.