Oracle CloudWorld 2024: 10 key takeaways from the big annual event

As competition heats up among cloud service providers, especially on the generative AI front, Oracle is focusing its energies on providing IT infrastructure that can help developers and enterprises take advantage of generative AI in their operations.

Shifting gears from his standpoint last year, Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison took to the stage last week to unveil the company’s strategies and products around multicloud, distributed cloud, AI, application development, and security.

Last year, Oracle revealed its three-tier generative AI strategy that included helping large language model providers, such as OpenAI, train their models.

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 saw the cloud services provider release updates that were aimed at extending the company’s three-tier strategy. Here are the key takeaways from the event:

Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence gets gen AI-powered developer assistant

Oracle said that it will be adding a new generative AI-powered developer assistant to its Fusion Data Intelligence service, which is part of the company’s Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.

Fusion Data Intelligence, which is an updated avatar of Fusion Analytics Warehouse, combines enterprise data, and ready-to-use analytics along with prebuilt AI and machine learning models to deliver business intelligence.

The generative AI-powered developer assistant is designed to help developers streamline the configuration of the Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence service and accelerate the addition of third-party data sources through a guided, step-by-step process.

Other updates to Fusion Data Intelligence include new AI-based intelligent applications for Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) that go beyond traditional analytics and recommend actions to users in critical day-to-day workstreams.

Oracle turns to Database 23ai to aid generative AI-based application development

As hyperscalers turn towards different APIs, and low-code interfaces to help enterprises infuse generative AI into their applications and operations, Oracle has decided to remain true to its strengths of offering, arguably, one of the most popular databases.

At CloudWorld 2024, Oracle unveiled a strategic update, dubbed generative development or GenDev, that provides enterprises with an AI-centric application development infrastructure.

In contrast to offerings such as Copilot Studio, Amazon Bedrock, and Vertex AI Studio, GenDev combines technologies in Oracle Database 23ai, including JSON Relational Duality Views, AI Vector Search, and APEX, to facilitate development using generative AI. 

Oracle makes its generative AI RAG Agent generally available

Although an incremental update, it is important to note that Oracle made its first generative AI agent, dubbed the RAG Agent, generally available at CloudWorld 2024.

“…the RAG Agent provides out-of-the-box RAG capabilities, enabling customers to get started while avoiding manual processes such as agent planning, retrieval, reranking, generation, and integration,” the company said in a statement, adding that the Agent provides a self-check mechanism to reduce hallucinations.

The agent would allow enterprises to access Oracle Database 23ai’s AI Vector Search functionality in order to run quicker similarity queries on enterprise data stored in the database.

The agent is part of OCI-based Generative AI Agents service, which was first announced in January in beta with the intent to help enterprises build conversational interfaces underpinned by generative AI-based assistants that are grounded in enterprise data, otherwise known as knowledge bases.

Oracle Code Assist moves to beta

Oracle Code Assist, the company’s AI-powered programming assistant, is available in a beta trial, the company said at its annual conference.

The beta version is optimized for Java and adds capabilities intended to boost the development of applications for OCI, Oracle added.

Oracle also announced new features for OCI Kubernetes Engine aimed at deploying and managing AI workloads and cloud-native applications on Kubernetes at scale.

Developers can access Oracle Code Assist through the Oracle Beta Program. The tool originally was unveiled in May.

Oracle’s Blackwell-based infra update to aid LLM-makers

Oracle has started taking pre-orders for 131,072 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in the cloud via its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster to aid large language model (LLM) training and other use cases, the company announced.

OCI Superclusters with Nvidia GB200 NVL72 liquid-cooled bare-metal instances will use NVLink and NVLink Switch to enable up to 72 Blackwell GPUs to communicate with each other at an aggregate bandwidth of 129.6 TBps in a single NVLink domain, Oracle and Nvidia said in a joint statement.

The Blackwell GPUs are expected to be made available in the first half of 2025, the companies added without sharing any indicative pricing.

Oracle expands multicloud, distributed cloud strategy with AWS partnership

In continuation of its efforts to help enterprises migrate to the cloud, Oracle said it is partnering with AWS to offer database services on the latter’s infrastructure.

This is Oracle’s third partnership with a hyperscaler to offer its database services on the hyperscaler’s infrastructure.

The new offering announced at CloudWorld 2024, Oracle Database@AWS, will allow enterprise users to access Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS.

Other updates include expanding the partnership with Google and Microsoft by offering database services across new cloud regions.

Oracle’s HeatWave data analytics service gets new gen AI features

The annual conference saw Oracle introducing new generative AI features to its managed data analytics and database service, Oracle HeatWave.

Oracle HeatWave encompasses several modules including HeatWave Lakehouse, HeatWave on AWS, HeatWave AutoML, HeatWave Gen AI, and MySQL HeatWave.

The generative AI-based updates have been added to the gen AI module and these include multi-lingual support, optical character recognition (OCR) support, LLM inference batch processing, JavaScript support, and automatic vector store updates. The module would allow developers to build generative AI-based applications without data movement or additional cost.   

Oracle unveils intelligent data lake and gen AI-powered analytics

Oracle has also updated its Data Intelligence platform by underpinning it with an intelligent data lake.

Oracle’s intelligent data lake, which is expected to enter limited availability in 2025, would help enterprises bring data from diverse sources into the Data Intelligence platform. This in turn would help enterprises to get a unified experience that takes care of orchestration, data warehousing, analytics, and AI requirements.

The intelligent data lake is being designed to include an open data lake with a unified developer experience, including a data catalog capability, Apache Spark and Apache Flink for data processing, and a Jupyter Notebook for data analysis and visualization.

Oracle adds Zero Trust Packet Routing capability to its cloud platform

Oracle added a new zero trust capability to its cloud platform, designed to prevent corporate data from being inadvertently exposed through network misconfigurations.

Zero Trust Packet Routing for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables enterprises to set security attributes on resources and write natural language policies that limit network traffic based on the resources and data services accessed, the company said.

ZPR separates network security from the underlying architecture. As a result, Oracle said, enterprises can safeguard themselves from one of the most common causes of compromise: network misconfigurations.

Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR), based on an open standard that Applied Invention and Oracle designed in 2023, is available immediately to OCI users at no charge.

Oracle Fusion Cloud suites get AI-based updates, new app for sustainability

The annual event saw Oracle enhancing its Fusion Cloud suites with AI-based updates and adding a new app for sustainability inside its enterprise performance management (EPM) suite.

The application, dubbed Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability,  integrates data from Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, enabling analysis and reporting within Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence.

Oracle also updated its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) suite with a new AI-powered feature, dubbed Oracle Dynamic Skills. The Dynamics Skills feature within Fusion Cloud HCM is expected to help enterprises keep tabs on their current and future requirement of skills. Further, the company said it was adding new user experience (UX) enhancements to its Fusion Cloud SCM offering. These enhancements are designed to help customers leverage AI to increase workforce productivity, expand visibility, accelerate processes, and prioritize the next best action to drive results.