Led by CEO Safra Catz and CTO Larry Ellison, Oracle’s annual CloudWorld convention in Las Vegas discovered the corporate trying again to its 47-year previous and forward to the long run.
Executives from the Texas-based tech large made a compelling, generally theatrical case for why Oracle’s historical past has positioned the agency on the forefront of the AI increase whereas envisioning a way forward for enhanced productiveness, safety, and innovation.
Amongst bulletins of latest partnerships, functions, and performance, CloudWorld 2024 was additionally a hub of futuristic pondering, presenting a portrait of an organization – and a digital infrastructure trade – at an inflection level.
Listed here are the important thing highlights from Oracle CloudWorld 2024:
Q1 Earnings Increase Accelerated by AI Integration
In over 120 classes hosted on the Venetian Conference and Expo Middle, various CloudWorld panel moderators pivoted from their introductory remarks to interviews with company prospects by saying some type of, “Nicely, don’t take my phrase for it.”
However even earlier than the frenetic convention corridor muzak performed, and earlier than Catz emerged to talk to a packed viewers, Oracle contextualized its convention with a robust first-quarter stability sheet. Revenues for the corporate rose 21% to $5.6 billion in the course of the interval. Web earnings totaled $2.93 billion, up on the $2.42 billion in the identical quarter a yr in the past.
Apparently, the earnings report itself grew to become an commercial for the corporate’s AI performance. As Steve Miranda, Oracle’s govt vice chairman of app improvement highlighted, what was notable wasn’t simply Oracle’s income and development, however how rapidly the corporate was capable of parse and current its Q1 knowledge – simply 9 days after the quarter ended. This, Miranda mentioned, was because of AI, which supplies the corporate visibility on its knowledge all through the quarter.
Oracle CloudWorld 2024 passed off on the Venetian Conference and Expo Middle, Las Vegas.
Nuclear Energy within the AI Age
Ellison made one among Oracle’s greatest headlines of the week together with his Monday earnings name announcement the corporate would spend money on three small nuclear reactors to energy an information heart with over 1 GW of AI capability. Though his keynote deal with at CloudWorld didn’t present any further particulars, Ellison mentioned that whereas Oracle now runs over 162 knowledge facilities globally, they may quickly be working over 1,000 services.
“Different vitality sources are essential to their success,” Kevin Sullivan, a principal at Pricewaterhouse Cooper, informed DCN. “Nuclear, on a private degree, makes me a bit of nervous. Different various vitality sources is perhaps higher choices. However all choices should be obtainable.”
Sullivan, whose crew at PwC was awarded the ‘Oracle World Service Accomplice Apps Award in Buyer Success’ for the second yr in a row, hosted a panel of his personal on the transformative energy of AI and began by citing the truth that 73% of US corporations have already got launched into an AI technique. That can imply discovering a method to meet the vitality calls for posed by this booming trade. “That is actual,” he mentioned. “That is right here to remain.”
The Multi-Cloud Period is One among Partnerships
On the heels of the announcement that Oracle was partnering with AWS, Catz and Ellison offered a imaginative and prescient of prioritizing buyer alternative and an ethos of compatibility between platforms and functions over strict self-interest.
“Lots of our longtime rivals at the moment are our companions,” Catz mentioned of Microsoft, Google, and AWS. She framed these partnerships as a return to the corporate’s roots, recalling how CloudWorld was initially known as OpenWorld. “Keep in mind?” she mentioned, “We constructed our know-how so that you, our prospects, may run it wherever you need.”
Ellison elaborated on this level. Within the firm’s early days, he mentioned, prospects had a variety of alternative. However within the cloud period, “We misplaced the concept that prospects may purchase know-how from many alternative corporations… [but now] providers on totally different clouds can work gracefully collectively. The clouds are not walled gardens.”
‘The Cyber Wars Are Getting Worse’
CloudWorld 2024 highlighted the year-over-year rise of cyber-attacks and posted the query: “How can we, as an trade, use AI to dramatically enhance cloud safety?” The reply, at the very least from Ellison, offered a few of the most evocative pictures on the occasion.
Standing in entrance of the phrases, “No Human Labor – No Human Error,” the Oracle co-founder claimed that almost all cyber-attacks start with human error, and described the corporate’s shift towards purely AI-generated code to remove safety vulnerabilities.
The manager additionally predicted in his keynote that Oracle workers a yr from now would entry programs purely utilizing biometric knowledge. He mentioned, “Why are you asking me for a password? Passwords are out of date.” Michelle Zatlin, co-founder of Cloudfare, emphasised the significance of AI in stopping cyber-attacks, claiming that over 100 million assaults had been stopped utilizing AI, whereas acknowledging, “It’s not getting safer on the market.”
Extra Information from Oracle CloudWorld 2024
-
Oracle unveiled the primary zettascale cloud computing clusters accelerated by the NVIDIA Blackwell platform. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is now taking orders for the most important AI supercomputer within the cloud – obtainable with as much as 131,072 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.
-
The corporate has launched an AI-centric generative development infrastructure for enterprises. “Leveraging Oracle Database 23ai applied sciences and assisted by AI, builders can concentrate on constructing app performance as an alternative of information infrastructure wants,” Oracle mentioned.
-
Oracle Code Help, an AI code companion, has been released in beta to assist “increase developer velocity.”
