Oracle pushes automation beyond database to cloud services

Oracle today announced the expansion of its drive to make its software autonomous to cloud services, as well as its database, at Cloud World New York.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2017 in San Francisco last October, the supplier announced what it trumpeted as the world’s first “autonomous database”.

Amit Zavery, executive vice-president, product development, Oracle Cloud Platform, said the latest announcement was a “big deal” because it went beyond the first step of what was announced for the automation of the core Oracle 18c database at OpenWorld.

Speaking on a pre-announcement call, he said: “This steps out to every service we offer in the cloud on the platform. Customers will start with the database or particular integrations. But typically you would have to do other things as well when you are building, running and maintaining applications. So, to have a platform for application development and delivery which is autonomous is a big deal for customers.

“Having one part that is autonomous is good, but to have an end-to-end system which gives you protection, reduces your maintenance and management, and gives you capabilities to reduce cost – this all matters.”

Oracle said in a statement that it is making all its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing.

“With its new suite of Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform services, including data management, application development, integration and management, Oracle is setting a new industry standard for autonomous cloud capabilities,” it said. “Oracle is applying AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning to its next-generation PaaS services to help organisations lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation and get predictive insights.”

In the same statement, the supplier said: “Many have largely adopted cloud as a way to reduce costs, but as the market develops, organisations will seek a cloud provider that can support their entire environment and secure their enterprise data. With an increasing number of security breaches and high-profile outages resulting from system and human error, customers want safeguards.”

Zavery added: “The future of tomorrow’s successful enterprise IT organisation is in full end-to-end automation.”

Saurabh Sharma, principal analyst at Ovum, said: “Platform as a service has become a critical component of the cloud delivery model to help drive business agility and innovation for enterprises. With Oracle revealing its AI and machine learning-based Autonomous PaaS, it is bringing productivity gains, cost reduction and human error reduction to the forefront of enterprises looking for possible ways to drive faster innovation. Oracle Autonomous PaaS will let enterprises scale, back up, upgrade, diagnose, correct and secure enterprise PaaS cloud services.”

Among the specific advantages the machine learning additions will make to Oracle’s cloud platform are, it said:

• Automation of mundane, repetitive tasks by providing bots that learn from, and automate away, frequent user actions.
• Enabling of fluid conversations through automated learning and self-training by self-learning bots.
• Reduction in the time and effort needed to automate business processes flowing across different software-as-a-service and on-premise applications with self-defining integrations.
• Elimination of manual tasks for ingesting streaming and batch data via self-defining data flows with automated data lake and data prep pipeline creation.
• Smarter decision-making with automated data discovery and preparation, automated analysis for key findings, along with visualisation and narration.