Oracle lauds customers and cloud collaboration at CloudWorld ’24

Increasing efficiency

Across its estate, said Hornbuckle, MGM Resorts receives something in the order of 15,000 to 20,000 inbound calls every day, seeking reservations and information, but with only 20% of those converting, the organisation is exploring using AI to handle the other 80% more efficiently.

Ultimately, he said, MGM Resorts wants to use Oracle to create tailored experiences for repeat visitors, who are many, using data on where they go, what they enjoy, and what they want, to create bespoke holiday packages.

Other customers taking to the main stage included the CIA – which technically became Oracle’s first customer in the mid-1970s when Larry Ellison built a database program for it – and banking powerhouse BNP Paribas.

Both of these organisations talked up how they have used Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to supercharge their IT and data management, with CIA chief information security officer La’Naia Jones referring to the intelligence agency as just like any regular enterprise in many ways.

Then, CloudFlare co-founder, president and chief operating officer Michelle Zatlyn described the integral role Oracle’s high-performance cloud plays in helping her organisation stop hundreds of thousands of attempted cyber attacks in their tracks, every day.

Ellison talks up multicloud

Later in the day, Larry Ellison, who turned 80 earlier this year, expanded on the theme of turning longstanding rivals into best multicloud buddies.

He lamented that the move to cloud at first caused the industry to lose sight of the idea that systems could be interoperable, but this, he continued, is now rightly changing – as Oracle’s newly minted partnership with AWS shows, he claimed.

“Customers typically use one or two or even three different infrastructure clouds,” said Ellison. “But today those clouds really don’t work well together. They’re not gracefully integrated.

“Some customers may want to move their Oracle databases and the applications that go with them from on-premise into AWS … They’d like to use the Oracle Exadata Database cloud service inside of AWS,” said Ellison.

“Multicloud interconnect … connecting the Oracle Cloud to AWS would make that possible,” he continued. “We can interconnect clouds, and in some cases we have. But [that] is not optimal, it’s not the ideal solution. A much better approach would be if we embedded an Oracle Cloud datacentre right inside AWS.”

The Oracle Database@AWS collab will become available in December 2024, and according to Ellison and AWS CEO Matt Garman, who briefly joined Oracle’s founder on stage, the two are already seeing interest from customers excited about the possibilities.

Ellison said the growth of what he characterised as true multicloud propositions heralds a step change in enterprise computing, bringing convenience and choice for Oracle customers with connections into the major hyperscalers, and others as well.

“The interesting thing about this multicloud world is whichever cloud is, if you will, your primary cloud, you can reach out to other clouds, infrastructure clouds and very soon application clouds, and mix and match the applications and the services that you want,” he said.