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Spoiler alert: What Oracle is going to announce today

It's clouds all the way down

OpenWorld It's that time of the year again. Oracle's OpenWorld is in San Francisco. Supremo Larry Ellison has given his Sunday keynote. Here's a summary of what the database giant is going to reveal today in easily digestible chunks.

And, yeah, warning: everything is now cloud. Anything you'd call an application or a software service is now a "cloud" at Oracle.

  • Oracle Database 12c Release 2 is going to be first made available via the tech goliath's cloud service.
  • The Oracle Analytics Cloud will include trained AI models so you can feed in data from sales, marketing, customer feedback, complaints and such stuff to predict outcomes using the supplied machine-learning packages. Oracle's Data Cloud also now touts anonymized customer and business profiles from 1,500 organizations, which is information you can use to train applications and make decisions.
  • New Adaptive Intelligent Applications, running on Oracle's cloud, suck in information about your staff and customers and spit out recommendations on how to squeeze the most out of them. They are basically cyber-PHBs. In Oracle's own words: "These new Adaptive Intelligent Applications ... apply advanced data science to learn and ingest data about an organization’s users and their behaviors to deliver targeted information to customers and employees." The apps can be potentially used in...
    • Finance to negotiate better rates with suppliers and plan better for tedious stuff like cashflow and end-of-the-quarter payments.
    • Human Resources to pick out the best applicants for jobs.
    • Marketing and Commerce to work out what ads work well and what don't.
    • Supply Chain management to select the right distribution channel given the latest transport pricing and availability.
  • There's a new Oracle Engagement Cloud that's essentially a customer service super-portal of "sales automation, service request management, knowledge management, and customer self-service."
  • The frightening sounding Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCCS) Cloud for beancounters to produce quarterly and annual financial reports, and the equally terrifying Oracle Revenue Management Cloud to monitor and audit contracts and money coming into a business.
  • The Oracle Student Cloud for universities to store and process undergrads' records.
  • For healthcare HR departments, there's the Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud for managing "complex labor rules and contractual terms that enable customers to define eligibility rules for core Human Resources and criteria for benefits, absence, time, and labor and payroll."
  • There's a Oracle Internet of Things Cloud that can gobble sensor data in real-time over the 'net. And the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud that, well, does what it sounds like.
  • Oracle's Cloud Platform will rent out bare-metal boxes like some kind of fancy data center colocation operation. This is supposed to act as a halfway house for organizations that want to move their software off premises and into the cloud but can't quite make the leap yet, so they'll spin up services on servers in Oracle's data centers.
  • The Oracle Ravello Cloud Service will run VMware and Linux KVM workloads on Big Red's servers, and the Oracle Container Cloud Service supports Docker to deploy container images on Big Red's hosted boxes.
  • Oracle’s Application Container Cloud Service has gained support for PHP, Node.js and Java. The new Oracle Cloud Stack Manager can be used to create and run applications built out of platform-as-a-service software. The Oracle Identity Cloud Service has appeared to manage user identities for off and on-premises accounts. The Oracle Security Monitoring and Analytics Cloud Service will look out for security threats on systems hosting enterprise applications.
  • Then there's the Oracle API Platform Cloud Service "to create, secure and manage their APIs with zero code and pre-built analytics charts, while being able to run the API gateway within the Oracle Cloud, on-premise or on third party clouds."

That's enough cloud for now. Ever cloud had the cloud feeling you're cloud being cloud beaten around the cloud head by something? There's lots of other minor little bits and pieces that have been added to Oracle's existing off-premises offerings. We'll be following OpenWorld this week so keep your eyes peeled for updates. ®

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