Last week we attended Oracle OpenWorld Europe in London. Two intense days full of insight and announcements. Under the theme ‘Breakthrough Starts Here’, the show covered the technology innovations that are shaping the way we work and that impact on business performance. These are some of the highlights of the event.

Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform 

Safra Catz, Oracle CEO, kicked off the show with a keynote that reflected on the company’s business transformation from siloed systems and fragmented data, to one in the cloud and data driven. During the same keynote, Catz announced the availability of the Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform.  At the core is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, helping enterprises to work collaboratively. It provides users with the ability to build, train, and manage machine learning algorithms on the Oracle Cloud using other popular data science tools like Python, TensorFlow, Keras and Jupyter. Six additional services were announced in parallel around the platform. Including new machine learning capabilities integrated into the Oracle Autonomous Database, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalogue, Oracle Big Data Service, Oracle Cloud SQL, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Flow, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Machines for Data Science. The Data Science Platform intends to sit alongside Oracle’s AI applications, which make use of machine learning and AI embedded throughout. An offering to allow enterprises to differentiate with their own AI models. 

Oracle and Microsoft Partnership 

Oracle is expanding it’s interoperability partnership with Microsoft, announced back in June 2019. Oracle and Microsoft are extending their cloud partnership with a new cloud interconnect location in Amsterdam. The new Amsterdam interconnect will enable businesses to share data across applications running in Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

The Future is Data-Driven 

Oracle Executive Vice President Juan Loaiza announced the new database features that enable customers to take advantage of new technology trends, like blockchain for fraud prevention, leveraging the flexibility of JSON documents, or training and evaluating machine learning algorithms inside the database. 

These new features include Oracle Machine Learning for Python (OML4Py), OML4Py AutoML, Native Persistent Memory Store, Automatic In-Memory Management, Native Blockchain Tables and JSON Binary Data Type. With these announcements, Oracle continues to lead the industry in delivering the world’s most comprehensive data management solutions, including the industry’s first and only self-driving database,  Oracle Autonomous Database. 

AI and How Emerging Technologies Create Competitive Advantage 

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the dominant narratives are often narrowed to good or bad. At this year’s conference, we attended a couple of Thought Leader sessions that proposed an alternative vision for the future of emerging technologies like AI development. With a people-first approach and focusing on clearly defining the problems we want to address and its solutions, we can embrace new technologies in a less disruptive way. 

We particularly enjoyed Dr Rand Hindi, Thought Leader sessions ‘AI and Human Intelligence’. Rand session shed light on unlocking possibilities with data, putting AI to work and leading the way. 

The two-day conference reminds us that we live in a world where the future of business is about innovation: embracing emerging technologies and the cloud and unlocking the power of data for better decisions and outcomes. Welcome the business value of intelligent technologies in many areas of the business that require automating repetitive manual tasks, and empowers the enterprise with strategic, forward-looking insights. Technology innovation is impacting roles and processes in Finance departments and across the enterprise alike. It is about people and technology working together, not one replacing the other.

If you would like to continue the conversation and learn how we can help your organisation embrace innovation and change, contact us today!