The Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC (“Ellison Institute”) and Oracle reveal a promising two-step technique to train a high-confidence predictive algorithm for enhanced cancer diagnostics. The study uses novel tissue “fingerprints”—discriminating microscopic hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histologic features—of tumors paired with correct diagnoses to facilitate deep learning in the classification of breast cancer ER/PR/HER2 status.

The approach was able to achieve unprecedented diagnostic accuracy for an algorithm of its type and purpose, while using less than a thousand annotated breast cancer pathology slides. The findings suggest that the algorithm’s ability to make correlations between a tumor’s architectural pattern and a correct diagnosis can ultimately help clinicians determine how a tumor will behave to a given treatment. 

The study was facilitated by Oracle for Research, Oracle’s global program that provides selected researchers with access to Oracle Cloud technology, consulting and support, and participation in the Oracle research user community.

The research appears in Scientific Reports.

Challenges of medical machine learning

The challenge of developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to diagnose cancer is that machine learning algorithms require clinically annotated data from tens of thousands of patients to analyze before they can recognize meaningful relationships in the data with consistency and high confidence. An ideal size dataset is nearly impossible to gather in cancer pathology.  Researchers training computers to diagnose cancer typically only have access to hundreds or low thousands of pathology slides annotated with correct diagnoses.

To overcome this limitation, the Ellison Institute scientists introduced a two-step process of priming the algorithm to identify unique patterns in cancerous tissue before teaching it the correct diagnoses.

“If you train a computer to reproduce what a person knows how to do, it’s never going to get far beyond human performance,” said lead author Rishi Rawat, PhD. “But if you train it on a task 10 times harder than anything a person could do you give it a chance to go beyond human capability. With tissue fingerprinting, we can train a computer to look through thousands of tumor images and recognize the visual features to identify an individual tumor. Through training, we have essentially evolved a computer eye that’s optimized to look at cancer patterns.”

The first step in the process introduces the concept of tissue “fingerprints,” or distinguishing architectural patterns in a tumor’s tissue, that an algorithm can use to discriminate between samples because no two patients’ tumors are identical.  These fingerprints are the result of biological variations such as the presence of signaling molecules and receptors that influence the 3D organization of a tumor. The study shows that AI spotted these fine, structural differentiations on pathology slides with greater accuracy and reliability than the human eye, and was able to recognize these variations without human guidance.

In this study, the research team took digital pathology images, split them in half and prompted a machine learning algorithm to pair them back together based on their molecular fingerprints.  This practice showcased the algorithm’s ability to group “same” and “different” pathology slides without paired diagnoses, which allowed the team to train the algorithm on large, unannotated datasets (a technique known as self-supervised learning).

“With clinically annotated pathology data in short supply, we must use it wisely when building classifiers,” said corresponding author Dan Ruderman, PhD., director of analytics and machine learning at the Ellison Institute. “Our work leveraged abundant unannotated data to find a reduced set of tumor features that can represent unique biology. Building classifiers upon the biology that these features represent enables us to efficiently focus the precious annotated data on clinical aspects.”

Once the model was trained to identify breast cancer tissue structure that distinguishes patients, the second step called upon its established grouping ability to learn which of those known patterns correlated to a particular diagnosis.  The discovery training set of 939 cases obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas enabled the algorithm to accurately assign diagnostic categories of ER, PR, and Her2 status to whole slide H&E images with 0.89 AUC (ER), 0.81 AUC (PR), and 0.79 AUC (HER2) on a large independent test set of 2531 breast cancer cases from the Australian Breast Cancer Tissue Bank.

While using Oracle Cloud technology, the study’s groundbreaking technique creates a new paradigm in medical machine learning, which may allow the future use of machine learning to process unannotated or unlabeled tissue specimens, as well as variably processed tissue samples, to assist pathologists in cancer diagnostics.

“Oracle for Research is thrilled to support and accelerate the Ellison Institute’s trailblazing discoveries through advanced cloud technology,” said Mamei Sun, Vice President, Oracle. “The Ellison Institute’s innovative use of machine learning and AI can revolutionize cancer research, treatment, and patient care – and ultimately improve the lives of many.”

Technique democratizes cancer diagnosis

In breast cancer, tumors that express a molecule called estrogen receptor look unique at the cellular level and fall into their own diagnostic category because they typically respond to anti-estrogen therapies.  Currently, pathologists must use chemical stains to probe biopsy samples for the presence of the estrogen receptor to make that diagnosis, and the process is time-consuming, expensive and variable. 

The established algorithm aims to improve pathologists’ accuracy and efficiency in a digital pathology workflow by directly analyzing tumor images to diagnose them as “estrogen receptor positive” without staining specifically for estrogen receptor. The study’s results support the notion that the use of tissue “fingerprints” may allow for a direct treatment response prediction, potentially obviating the need for molecular staining approaches currently utilized in cancer theragnosis.

An exciting application of this technology lies in the possibility of deploying computer-assisted diagnostics in medically underserved regions and developing nations that lack expert pathologists, specialists and the laboratory infrastructure to stain for molecular markers.

While the study suggests additional investigation is warranted to gain a deeper understanding of AI’s ability to determine molecular status based on tissue architecture, it sets the stage for future applications where the technique could potentially aid in troubleshooting challenging tumor classification issues and enhance human pathologists’ abilities to arrive at correct diagnoses and better inform treatment decisions.

About this study

In addition to Rawat and Ruderman, other study authors include Itzel Ortega, Preeyam Roy and David Agus of the Ellison Institute; along with Ellison Institute affiliate Fei Sha of USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience; and USC collaborator Darryl Shibata of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center at Keck School of Medicine.

The study’s computing resources were facilitated by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure through Oracle for Research, Oracle’s global program providing free cloud credits and technical support to researchers, and was supported in part by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation grant BCRF-18-002.  

In addition to his appointment at the Ellison Institute, Ruderman is an assistant professor of research medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.

Oracle announced today the award of a Framework Agreement for the provision of secure cloud services to the Government of Canada. This agreement gives Oracle's Canadian federal government customers the ability to securely store, manage and process sensitive data and applications in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Focused on a “cloud-first” strategy, the Government of Canada uses cloud services as its preferred delivery option when initiating information technology investments, initiatives, strategies and projects. The access to Oracle Cloud regions in Toronto and Montreal afforded by this agreement will help support Canadian government and affiliated public sector entities in their digital transformation efforts.

Oracle Cloud is ideal for mission-critical workloads like financials and other back office applications, as well as newer workloads like simulations, machine learning, and cloud native applications. Oracle’s Canadian Cloud regions today offer Oracle Cloud services that include Compute (CPU and GPU virtual machine and bare metal), Storage (block, object, and archive storage, including new immutable object storage capabilities), Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata Cloud Services, FastConnect, Identity and Access Management, Key Management Service, and Load Balancer.

“This Framework Agreement for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a critical step in meeting the growing demands and compliance requirements of our public sector customers,” said Walter Dann, Area Vice President, Oracle Public Sector. “By achieving this milestone, we are able to help the federal government and Canadian public sector tap into our second generation cloud to not just keep pace, but also stay ahead of the evolving business and technology landscape. Oracle’s outstanding price-performance, Oracle Autonomous Database, machine learning and AI innovations along with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure secure by design will be key to enabling our customers’ enterprise workloads in the cloud.”

Oracle is pleased to work with the Government of Canada to support the evaluation of Oracle Cloud. Working with the Government of Canada, Oracle Cloud was assessed across a robust set of controls and global certifications including SOC and ISO. Oracle’s support of these controls and certifications assures customers that all workloads across the government and private sector meet a high level of assurance.  

Oracle Cloud was developed with a particular focus on addressing government cloud needs with capabilities including strong encryption, in-depth auditing, and robust security controls and tools.  With this new agreement, the Government of Canada now has access to a compelling array of advanced technology, including machine learning-enabled applications, integrated security tools, automated analytics, and Oracle Autonomous Database.

Oracle Cloud is a second generation enterprise cloud platform that delivers powerful compute and networking performance and includes a comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure and platform cloud services. With this new agreement, the Government of Canada now has access to the only second generation Cloud built to run Oracle Autonomous Database, the industry’s first and only self-driving database with performance SLAs.

Today, thousands of public sector customers worldwide use Oracle’s digital solutions to transform how their constituents engage with government. Now, these cloud services will be extended to Oracle’s largest customer in the Canadian region. For more information, go to https://www.oracle.com/communitydevelopment.

Driven by strong customer demand, Oracle today announced Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the industry’s first fully-managed cloud region that brings all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud applications, to customer datacenters, starting at only $500K a month. Get started here.

With this offering, enterprises get the exact same complete set of modern cloud services, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, superior price-performance, and highest levels of security available from Oracle’s public cloud regions in their own datacenters. This is ideal for highly regulated or security-focused businesses needing to meet demanding latency and data residency requirements, reduce operational costs, and modernize legacy applications.

Over the past few years, enterprise adoption of public clouds has gone mainstream as companies took advantage of the pay-as-you-go economics, scale, and agility of cloud computing. However, most enterprises expect to continue to run a portion of their workloads in on-premises datacenters for the foreseeable future. This has resulted in strong demand from customers for a hybrid architecture where the same services, same functionality, and easy portability of applications exists between their public and on-premises cloud environments. But until today, no solution was able to bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises environments. On-premises offerings from other cloud providers offer a very small subset of the services available in their public cloud regions. With today’s announcement, Oracle is making all of its cloud services—more than 50 services—available on-premises so enterprises can use Oracle’s cloud services wherever they need them—in the cloud or on-premises via Cloud@Customer.

“Enterprise customers have told us that they want the full experience of a public cloud on-premises, including access to all of Oracle’s cloud services, to run their most important workloads,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “With Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, enterprises get all of our second-generation cloud services, including Autonomous Database, in their datacenters. Our major competitors can’t offer customers a comparable dedicated cloud region running on-premises.”

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer includes full management capabilities and access to new features and functions the moment they become available in Oracle’s public cloud. It provides strong isolation of customer data, including all API operations, which remain local to customer datacenters and provide the highest levels of security. Additionally, Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is certified to seamlessly run Oracle Cloud applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications (Cloud ERP, Cloud HCM, Cloud SCM, and Cloud CX, making it a completely integrated cloud experience on-premises. Customers only pay for services they consume using the same predictable low pricing offered in Oracle’s public cloud regions.

“With Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, Oracle delivers a slice of its public cloud experience into customer datacenters, with no changes in pricing or capabilities,” said Deepak Mohan, Research Director at IDC. “This represents a new direction for public cloud providers, who have historically offered only limited versions of their services to customer premises. Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer brings the full capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, including over 50 services, to customer premises. This brings together public cloud service capability with the compliance, latency and co-location benefits of on premises—which can be a game changer for large scale digital transformation efforts at enterprises.”

Global Organizations Adopt Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer

Nomura Research Institute (NRI), Ltd. is the largest consulting firm and IT solutions provider in Japan. “With Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, we can use Oracle Exadata as a cloud service and achieve greater agility, such as seamless expansion, while maintaining high availability at the same level as on-premises,” said Tomoshiro Takemoto, Senior Corporate Managing Director, NRI. “Built in our own datacenter, it also enables us to not only provide SOC2 reports based on Japanese security standards in financial industries, but it also allows us to access broader cloud services and tools provided by Oracle and further increase our business value for our customers.”

Oman Information and Communications Technology Group is an entity owned by State General Reserve Fund (SGRF) of the Government of Oman. “Oman Information and Communications Technology Group (OICTG), is committed to propel and shape the Sultanate’s ICT sector. Our investments, focused initiatives and bespoke partnerships aim to unlock the full potential of ICT. So, by fostering Omani talents, we will actively support the ongoing diversification of Oman’s economic development as outlined in His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik’s Oman 2040 Vision,” said HH Sayyid Kamil Fahad Al-Said; Chairman of Oman ICT Group. “Furthermore, and to meet the Sultanate’s needs of digital transformation, our centralized, innovatively structured digital framework will support the ownership and management of cloud-ready IT services. The OICTG’s sustainable, economically sensitive budget and attainable, realistic time-bound goals will guarantee maximum operational performance, flexible scalability and a secure data residency file under the accountable canopy of the Oman Investment Authority.”

“Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer enables a variety of use cases, from migrating Oracle ERP and CRM applications to deploying custom developed applications using Oracle Database, as well as implementing Digital Innovation Services (Blockchain, AI, Big Data) and High-Performance Computing (HPC), all while following the country regulations regarding data sovereignty,” said Said Al-Mandhari, CEO, Oman ICT Group.

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer

Building on the success of Oracle’s Exadata Cloud@Customer service over the last three years, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer. This new offering combines the latest Oracle Database with the fastest Oracle Database platform—Exadata—delivered as a cloud service in customer datacenters. It eliminates database management and capital expenditures while enabling pay-per-use and elastic consumption of database cloud resources. Now, Autonomous Database is available to run in customer data centers both as a standalone offering and as part of Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the industry’s first on-premises cloud region, which was also announced today. Get started here.

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer is the simplest and fastest transition to a cloud model with typical deployments taking less than a week. Existing applications in a datacenter can simply connect and run without requiring any application changes—while data never leaves the customer’s datacenter. This is ideal for enterprises that find it challenging to move their mission-critical database workloads to the public cloud due to data sovereignty and regulatory requirements, security and performance concerns, or because their on-premises applications and databases are tightly coupled. 

“Exadata Cloud@Customer has been successfully deployed at hundreds of customers, including large financial services companies, telecoms, healthcare providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to modernize their infrastructure and lower costs by up to 50 percent,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. “We are now bringing Oracle Autonomous Database to customer datacenters—freeing DBAs and developers from mundane maintenance tasks and enabling them to innovate and create more business value.”

Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer enables organizations to move to an environment where everything is automated and managed by Oracle. Autonomous operations include: database provisioning, tuning, clustering, disaster protection, elastic scaling, securing and patching, which eliminates manual processes and human error while reducing costs and increasing performance, security and availability. The serverless architecture automatically scales to match changing workloads, providing true pay-per-use.

“Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer combines the game changing capabilities of the revolutionary Exadata X8M platform with Oracle’s most advanced machine-learning-powered database and its second-generation cloud control plane for a true enterprise-grade database cloud experience on-premises,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC. “Every business has a set of ISV and home grown applications that they depend on to run all aspects of their business from finance to manufacturing, HR, orders, procurement, and operations. For companies serious about running these types of critical Oracle-based applications in an on-premises enterprise database cloud, Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer is currently the most advanced offering in the market today.”

Customers can leverage Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer to consolidate thousands of databases and run the converged, open Oracle Database for multiple data types and workloads including Machine Learning, JSON, Graph, spatial, IOT and In-Memory, instead of deploying fragmented special-purpose databases. With Oracle Autonomous Database on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, organizations can work with up to 7x larger databases, achieve greater database consolidation, and improve performance with up to 12x more SQL IOPS, 10x more SQL throughput, and 98 percent lower SQL latency than RDS on AWS Outposts. Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer reduces customers’ infrastructure and database management by up to 90 percent because they only have to focus on the schemas and data inside their databases, not on running the underlying database infrastructure.

In addition to the new Cloud@Customer offerings, Oracle continues to enhance the capabilities of the Autonomous Database. Oracle today announced the certification of Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards running on Oracle Autonomous Database. By using Autonomous Database, Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards customers will lower their costs while improving security, performance, and availability. The company also announced Oracle Autonomous Data Guard which delivers an autonomously managed high availability and disaster recovery solution protecting against database and site failures. Oracle Autonomous Data Guard provides near zero data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO) objectives in the face of catastrophic failures.

Global Organizations Welcome New Cloud@Customer Offerings

Samsung SDS is the largest enterprise cloud solutions provider in Korea, delivering data-driven digital innovations to customers in 41 countries worldwide. “Back in 2010, we adopted the first Exadata platform to improve a display manufacturing system,” said Dr. WP Hong, CEO, Samsung SDS. “Now 10 years later, we have implemented nearly 300 Exadata systems for our customers in manufacturing, financial services, construction and engineering, and public and private sector services. Aligning with our digital innovation strategy and our journey to enterprise cloud, we have now adopted the first Exadata Cloud@Customer in one of our datacenters and look forward to deploying Autonomous Database.”

NTT DoCoMo is the number one mobile carrier in Japan with the largest customer base. “Oracle Exadata is implemented as our core engine to process the call, communication, and billing information of 80M users in real-time,” said Taku Hasegawa, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Information Systems Department, NTT DoCoMo. “Thanks to Exadata, we could cut operation and maintenance costs in half, while realizing 10x performance. As the core infrastructure for DoCoMo’s digital transformation and further business growth, I look forward to the continuous evolution of Oracle Exadata and the novel technology innovation driven by Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer.”

Crédit Agricole CIB is the Corporate and Investment Banking arm of the Crédit Agricole Group, one of the world’s largest banks. “Moving to Exadata Cloud@Customer has significantly improved our accounting information systems performance, which has enabled us to carry out our accounting closing process with much greater agility and to reduce our operational costs,” said Pierre-Yves Bollard, Global Head of Finance IT, Crédit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank. “The high value provided by the Exadata Cloud@Customer infrastructure has been recognized by all IT and business teams.”

Entel is the largest telecom provider in Chile and the third largest in Peru. “We have used Exadata systems for the past five years to support many applications across dozens of lines of business, including crucial billing and network management systems,” said Helder Branco, Head of IT Operations, Entel. “By using Exadata, we improved mission-critical Oracle Database performance by up to 3x, and reduced our security exposure. We are taking our digital transformations to the next level by moving over 30 databases to Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer and improving their security with its self-securing capabilities.”

RKK Computer Service is an IT consultancy based in Japan, focusing on local governments and financial institutions. “RKK Computer Service selected Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to host our shared platform that runs core business systems for 100 municipalities,” said Chihiro Sato, Deputy General Manager, Public Sector Planning and Development Division, RKK Computer Service. “Compared to our previous on-premises solution, we have 24 percent cost savings and more than 70 percent IO performance improvement, which enables us to run concurrent batch processes for multiple municipalities. High availability is achieved with RAC and Data Guard. We believe that Oracle’s second-generation Exadata Cloud@Customer is a promising cloud platform for municipalities. RKKCS will continuously enhance our cloud infrastructure for municipalities by exploring Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer to improve operational efficiency.”

The State of Queretaro is located in central Mexico. “Based on a directive from the state governor and state secretary to address the COVID-19 crisis, we were asked to develop an application that would allow the citizens and patients of the State of Querétaro, Mexico, to carry out a self-diagnosis to help avoid the spread of infections,” said Pedro Gonzalez, Director CIAS, Queretaro State Government, Mexico. “With Oracle Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer, we were able to react quickly and develop a mobile application in less than three weeks — plus we were able to adhere to state regulations to maintain the sensitive data of citizens and patients in our facilities. We look forward to investing in Oracle Autonomous Database this year, which will free up our staff and resources to focus on developing new business applications without spending any time on patching, tuning, and maintaining the database.” 

Siav is an enterprise content management software and IT services company based in Italy. “We chose Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer to help us manage the constant growth of our business in cloud services and solutions,” said Nicola Voltan, CEO, Siav S.p.A. “Exadata Cloud@Customer provides the performance, scalability and security we need to offer the highest quality service to our customers. It’s managed by Oracle in our datacenter, enabling us to comply with the Italian legislation related to the geographical location of the service provided.”

New Exadata Cloud@Customer Enhancements

In addition to the Autonomous Database, Oracle is announcing the following Exadata Cloud@Customer enhancements:

• Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M Technology, which combines Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory and 100 gigabit remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to remove storage bottlenecks and dramatically increase performance for the most demanding workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), IoT, fraud detection, and high frequency trading. Direct database access to shared persistent memory increases peak performance to 12 million SQL read IOPS, 2.5X greater than the prior generation offering powered by Exadata Database Machine X8. Additionally, Exadata X8M dramatically reduces the latency of critical database IOs by enabling remote IO latencies below 19 microseconds—more than 10X faster than the prior generation offering. These ultra-low latencies are achieved even for workloads requiring millions of IOs per second.

• Multiple VM Clusters per Exadata Rack, which enables organizations to share an Exadata system for production, DR and dev/test and provide isolation across departments and use cases.

• PCI-DSS Certification: Exadata Cloud@Customer now supports and meets Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirements and can be implemented as part of a highly secure financial processing environment.

Oracle today announced that Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has selected Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to run its critical, high-volume business platform used in various industries, including financial, retail, and distribution. NRI will start by moving its SaaS applications for the financial industry, which are used by about 70 percent of the capital markets firms in Japan, from on-premises to an Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer in its own datacenter. This will provide NRI with access to all of Oracle’s second-generation public cloud services while ensuring control and governance because the cloud services are in NRI’s own datacenter. During NRI and Oracle’s 30-year partnership, NRI has been an early adopter of Oracle technology and is now the first global customer to move to Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. 

“With Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, we can use Oracle Exadata as a cloud service and achieve greater agility, such as seamless expansion, while maintaining high availability at the same level as on-premises,” said Tomoshiro Takemoto, Senior Corporate Managing Director, NRI. “Built in our own datacenter, it enables us to not only provide SOC2 reports based on Japanese security standards in financial industries, but it also allows us to access broader cloud services and tools provided by Oracle and further increase our business value for our customers. With Oracle’s Dedicated Region, we can significantly reduce our on-premises costs and invest more in our digital transformation.”

“Oracle is excited to extend our strategic relationship with NRI to modernize and support the financial services market in Japan and globally,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Only Oracle Cloud enables customers to utilize our full-featured cloud services anywhere, whether it’s our global public cloud region portfolio or the new dedicated regions for customers with data sovereignty, latency, regulatory, security and compliance requirements. With the differentiated model of our Dedicated Region, NRI will be able to modernize and truly deliver a first-class, cloud-native experience to their customers while meeting all of their requirements.”

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer enables customers to build Oracle’s public cloud regions in customers’ own datacenters. Customers can access all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including Bare Metal Compute, VMs and GPUs, Autonomous Database, and Exadata Cloud Service; container-based services like Container Engine for Kubernetes; and analytics services like Data Flow, while also having control and governance of their systems and services. With Oracle Cloud@Customer, enterprises can seamlessly lift and shift legacy workloads and consolidate on a single platform, enabling them to dramatically improve TCO without requiring re-architecture. Customers also have access to a full set of development services, like API Gateway and Events Services that will help them incrementally modernize their stack in-place, reducing the risk and expense of adopting new technologies.

Download the report

Following a long stretch of stay-at-home orders, consumers are eager to get out and travel according to a new research study from Oracle and Skift. Just over half (51%) of people surveyed in both North and Latin America plan to book trips in the next six months, while 38% of those in Asia-Pacific and Europe are planning get-aways. People, however, are opting to stay closer to home with driving distance (47%) or domestic trips (44%) being favored. With so much uncertainty ahead, consumers are also demanding flexible cancellation and refund policies (76%) and are more open to considering hotels offering discounted rates (65%).

Consumers’ willingness to travel also comes with heavy caveats for hotels in terms of advancements in cleaning and technology. In response, 70% of hotels already are or are planning to adopt contactless technology for check-in, food ordering, concierge services and more. Ninety percent have or are planning to also increase cleaning and disinfecting frequency and training for staff on these procedures and safer guest interactions (89%).

“As the hospitality industry turns a corner on the road to recovery, technology will be critical to protecting travelers and workers alike,” said Alex Alt, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Hospitality. “Safety rightly remains consumers’ top priority when they consider traveling, and the hospitality industry is doubling down on technology to facilitate social distancing and reduce face to face interaction for guests’ protection.”

The global study, A Data-Driven Look at Hospitality’s Recovery, explored 4,600 consumers and 1,800 hotel executives’ attitudes and outlook on travel, including changes to the guest and employee experience, booking policies and distribution, and the industry’s recovery outlook.

Shifting Demand, Changing Operations

With international border restriction and flying concerns, hotels will be welcoming new types of travelers, making the stakes high to leave a positive impression that will lead to repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations. The survey found that:

• Border closures reshaping guest profile: More than 30% of executives surveyed said they expected to see a few more or significantly more domestic travelers, and over 60% were expecting fewer or significantly fewer international travelers. This may offer a silver lining for North American hoteliers, 57% of whom agreed that the greatest majority of their guests were domestic travelers before the health crisis, signaling a more limited impact on demand.
• New policies court travelers: Hotels are moving swiftly to abide by consumer demands with more than 80% of executives reporting that they were considering or have already made changes to allow for more flexible cancellation and refund policies.
• Safety will be the new gold standard: Unsurprisingly, space and cleanliness will remain critical, with 84% of travelers agreeing that ‘creating social distancing’ rules for hotel public spaces will be the most influential factor in their decision about which travel brands to choose for upcoming trips. Hotel executives appear ready to meet these expectations, with 82% either considering or already altering public spaces to enable social distancing.

Technology Paramount to a Positive Safer Guest Experience

Technology is enabling social distancing and cleanliness by reducing the need for in-person interactions and empowering hotels to deliver ‘high-touch’ service without the ‘touch.’ Specifically:

• Hotels go contactless: More than 70% of executives said they were considering or are already using contactless payment and digital messaging services, and close to 60% were considering/already using room keys activated by smartphone. Consumers concur, indicating that contactless payments (35%), digital room keys (26%) and digital messaging services (20%) were among the top three changes that would make them feel more comfortable staying in a hotel.
• Self-service tools let guests skip the front desk: Over 70% of executives agreed or strongly agreed that self-service technology will be important to assisting guests while minimizing unnecessary contact, with two thirds (67%) reporting they were considering or are already using self-service check-in procedures. A similar portion of consumers (70%) agreed or strongly agreed they’d be more willing to stay at hospitality businesses that implemented these types of services, with 23% citing self-service check-in via kiosk as a change that would increase their comfort.
• Ample amenities, less interaction: More than 60% of executive respondents reported they were considering or already making changes to expand room service options, and 50% are looking into expanding meal takeout/delivery options. One-fifth of guests ranked expanded room service options as a top factor for alleviating concerns, allowing them to avoid shared spaces such as hotel restaurants.

Methodology

The Oracle and Skift survey queried more than 1,800 hospitality executives, from a mix of businesses including hotels, short-term rental operators, cruise companies, boutique hotels and casinos, among others, to understand their opinions about an altered marketplace. Additionally, 4,600 consumers across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America were surveyed to understand the COVID-19’s impact on travel plans and expectations for hotel stays.

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) has been named a Leader in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises” analysis,[1] with the furthest overall position for Completeness of Vision and highest overall position for Ability to Execute. This is the fourth consecutive year that Gartner has named the company a Leader based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. A complimentary copy of the report is available here.

According to the report, “Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how core financial management systems and processes can be supported and improved by moving them to the cloud. They couple this with a clear ability to execute this vision through products, services and go-to-market strategies. They have a strong presence in the market and are growing their revenue and market share. In this market, Leaders show a consistent ability to secure deals with enterprises of different sizes and have a good depth of functionality across all areas of core financial management. They have multiple proofs of successful deployments by customers, both in their home region and elsewhere. Their offerings are often used by system integrator partners to support financial transformation initiatives. Leaders typically address a wide market audience by supporting broad market requirements. However, they may fail to meet the specific needs of vertical markets or other, more specialized segments, which might be better addressed by Niche Players in particular.”

“We are once again delighted with Gartner’s recognition of Oracle’s Leader position in the cloud ERP market.” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Applications Development, Oracle. “We believe our continued leadership highlights our success in addressing the complex and evolving needs of the world’s leading organizations. Importantly, we further believe the breadth, depth, and continuous innovations of our solutions are a must-have for CFO’s navigating today’s fluid corporate finance environment.”

More than 7,100 organizations across 23 industries and in over 125 countries have adopted Oracle to help drive their finance transformation. Customers are rapidly taking advantage of on-going quarterly innovation updates in machine learning/AI, digital assistants, and world-class analytics to help their finance teams improve decision-making, accelerate processes, and drive efficiencies to deliver the real-time insights needed for competitive advantage.

Over seven years of unparalleled partnership between these customer organizations, implementation partners, and Oracle have also created a mature global ecosystem of expertise to enable fast time-to-value journey to cloud. Oracle and its partner community offer world-class proven services from best practice cloud adoption strategy, to implementation and go-live support, and ultimately ongoing business process optimization and innovation adoption. In addition, customers also benefit from Cloud Customer Connect, a premier, vibrant, 200,000 member strong community, designed to promote peer-to-peer collaboration and engagement with Oracle’s product development experts.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) features a full range of business capabilities including Financials, Procurement, Project Management, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Risk Management & Compliance. With native integration to the broader suite of Oracle Cloud Applications, including supply chain and manufacturing, human resources, and sales, service, and marketing, Oracle provides a complete solution to help customers enhance productivity, reduce costs and improve controls.

Oracle has been named a Leader in more finance and ERP-related Gartner Magic Quadrants. In addition to being recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises,¹” Oracle was also recently named a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises²” and the 2019 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions³” and “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions⁴” reports.

¹Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 29 June 2020
²Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, Tim Faith, Duy Nguyen, Denis Torii, Paul Schenck, Christian Hestermann, 22 June 2020
³Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 21 October 2019
⁴Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 8 August 2019

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Oracle Hospitality is committed to helping the hospitality industry get back to business. To support this effort, Oracle, with support from HTNG, recently hosted Innovation Week, a collaborative event dedicated to accelerating the industry’s recovery and accommodating the rapidly evolving demand for low or contactless guest and employee interactions. The inaugural event drew 465 attendees across more than 200 hospitality technology organizations from 48 countries who came together to not only foster dialogue about innovation, but make it a reality. The event offered an expedited pathway to integration with Oracle Hospitality solutions, offering hoteliers more choices in technology to help them prepare for the new next.

During the five-day event, many vendors were able to make significant progress in the development of their integrations.

“We expected to spend weeks building our integration, but with the help of Oracle Hospitality experts, we were able to do it within days,” said Andreas Loeseth, COO of Fácil, which worked on an OPERA Cloud PMS integration enabling self-service check-in and check-out using a mobile app or kiosk. “Innovation Week showed us the level of Oracle’s commitment to open APIs and helping vendors develop new solutions for hoteliers. It’s exactly the type of assistance we need to fuel an industry recovery.”

Learn more about Innovation week and access the on-demand sessions.

“Oracle Hospitality stands apart in terms of the depth and breadth of the partners who integrate with our flagship platforms OPERA Cloud, OPERA 5 and Simphony. It is unparalleled. We also understand how critical technology is to deliver a great guest experience, especially during this time,” said Alex Alt, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Hospitality. “Innovation Week successfully paved the way for new and existing vendor-partners to ramp up innovation and help solutions get to market much faster.”

A League of Their Own

In addition to the many hospitality vendors new to the Oracle ecosystem, Innovation Week also featured several Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) members with Oracle Validated Integrations focused on low-touch or contactless solutions, including:

• ALICE: Offers an all-in-one solution that enables hotel staff to do the most impactful work without all the guesses. The ALICE/Oracle integration is a two-way, real-time interface that connects all hotel operations to the hotel’s PMS, enabling increased visibility across departments. The seamless communication between OPERA and ALICE removes the need for hoteliers to switch between two systems and focus their time and attention on delivering exceptional hospitality. Some of the properties leveraging the ALICE/Oracle integration include Montage Hotels & Resorts, Omni Hotels & Resorts properties, Viceroy Hotels and Resorts and Calamigos Guest Ranch.
• Hapi: Offers a cloud data hub that enables centralized exposure of data from disparate systems, spanning on premise and hosted. Hapi builds on the Oracle OPERA Cloud’s promise of centralized, open APIs by bringing this functionality to legacy customers now and enabling a smoother transition to the cloud. Integration partners can also use multiple OPERA interface protocols in a single Hapi connection, and large hotel chains can benefit from custom OPERA integrations into their tech ecosystems. The Hapi/ Oracle integration is currently being used by IHG, Accor, Red Lion Hotels, Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, Langham Hotels and Resorts, just to name a few.
• InnSpire: This 2020 HTNG TechOvation award-winning company offers a contactless, all-in-one technology suite that seamlessly helps drive a world class digital guest experience for some of the world’s most iconic hotels and brands. The key benefits of the company’s integration include accelerating the personalization of the guest experience, leveraging demographics and personal interests to customize in-room digital interfaces, such as Apps, TV-experience and voice. Today, the InnSpire/Oracle integration is being used by LUX* Resorts and Hotels, ME Dubai by Melia and many more.
• INTELITY: As the leading provider of guest experience management solutions for the hospitality industry, INTELITY unites mobile, in-room and back-office tools into one robust, fully-integrated hospitality platform. INTELITY’s integration with OPERA PMS enhances and streamlines a wide range of guest-facing activities, including contactless check-in, mobile key, touchless service requests and more. INTELITY also integrates with MICROS Simphony, allowing guests to place dining orders from their devices or an in-room tablet. With mutual customers worldwide, some hotels taking advantage of the INTELITY/Oracle integration include Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Hyatt, YOTEL and Mystic Lake Casino Hotel.
• Nonius: This 2020 HTNG TechOvation award-winning company offers solutions to help hoteliers provide a great and contactless guest experience. Nonius has integrated its products with Oracle, including Mobile check-in and Key, Guest internet access, TV, Voice & Cast. Some hotels leveraging the Nonius/Oracle integration are from renowned groups such as Belmond, Accor, IHG, Four Seasons, GHM Hotels, Hard Rock Hotels, Marriot, Pestana and many more.
• Zaplox: Offers contact-free mobile guest journey and mobile key services for the global hotel market. Zaplox solutions save time and costs while providing hotels with a direct channel to communicate with the guests and the opportunity to generate additional revenue. The contact-free mobile guest journey also supports the "Safe Stay” guidelines providing contact-free and touchless options for guests during their stay. The Zaplox/Oracle integration is currently being used by Arlo Hotels, Union Hoteli, ARP Hansen Hotel Group and many other global properties.

“Oracle’s architecture is truly open and that directly helps to ignite and accelerate industry innovation,” said Luis Weir, director of product management, Oracle Hospitality integration and APIs. “Our approach allows hoteliers to work directly with our partners to build experiences that are better suited to tackle new challenges and meet evolving guest expectations. And by providing a standardized set of modern, secure APIs, we allow them to do it quickly and cost effectively – delivering innovation by encouraging customization.”

Resources to Accelerate Innovation for the New Next

• Hospitality Cloud Marketplace: A cloud-based marketplace where certified partners can list their offerings, systems, product descriptions and demo links.
• New Next Vendor-Partner Integrations: An extensive listing of integrations specifically built to enable contactless operations.
• Technology Guide for a Touchless Guest Journey: This comprehensive playbook covers contactless operations, integration challenges and solutions, technology budgeting, low-touch solutions and advice to help hotels differentiate their offerings with innovative and emerging technology.
• Oracle Hospitality Resource Center: A global information and resource hub to help all those within the hospitality industry.

Panini Internazionale was borne out of a passion for food held by four brothers who opened their first deli in Stockholm, Sweden in 1990. Thirty years later, the fast-food brand delivers fresh and healthy food from 29 shops across Stockholm.

With a focus on contemporary fast-food that is both healthy and green, the only thing fast about Panini is its service. To deliver on its brand promise, goal of zero food waste, and exemplary service, the company relies on Oracle Food and Beverage MICROS Simphony Point-of-Sale (POS).

“We pride ourselves on not only delivering good food and service but also in doing good for our communities,” said Pierre Constantinou, co-founder Panini Internazionale. “With Oracle as our core foundation, we can easily pivot to new channels for our customers to engage how and when they desire while using back-end data to understand our inventory and eliminate waste by sharing our excess stock with those in need.”

Tech Helps Panini Deliver on Brand Values and Bottom Line

Panini has been an early adopter of technology, introducing online ordering in the late 1990s. But as the business grew, it realized adding new channels to their POS added complexity and put their zero-waste commitment at risk. Operating a business based on fresh production and same-day consumption requires real-time supply and demand. Panini needed a better way to manage its menu and inventory, and streamline kitchen operations. The company adopted Oracle MICROS Simphony to get the intelligence they needed to manage everything from menu design and supplier relationships to forecasting demand down to the day and time. Panini also used Simphony to identify partnerships that are mutually beneficial to the brand.

Simphony also helped Panini reach its goal of zero waste. It uses technology to allocate remaining stock at a 50 percent discount to students for the last two hours of business, and at the end of the day nearby charities are alerted to pick up final stock. This commitment to zero waste is not only in alignment with their brand values, but it also supports a healthy bottom line.

“Data intelligence will be increasingly important as the restaurant industry rebounds,” said Simon de Montfort Walker, senior vice president and general manager for Oracle Food and Beverage. “Simphony gives Panini Internazionale a single view of their business so they can run operations efficiently, better manage the bottom line, and support their customers and communities.”

Oracle Utilities Opower has completely reimagined the Home Energy Report (HER). Starting this summer, the new reports can help millions of households save money and reduce their carbon footprint through dynamic new experiences. With bold designs, new energy insights and applied behavioral science, the new Opower HERs make it easy for utilities to reach all types of customers and achieve outcomes ranging from driving energy efficiency savings to increasing customer satisfaction and digital channel engagement. They can also be used to accelerate the adoption of energy-saving programs such as efficient home upgrades and smart devices, and coach customers to maximize the impact of emerging technology, such as residential solar and electric vehicle charging.

“FirstEnergy serves multiple states, all with different customer needs, efficiency goals and regulatory structures, so it’s important that we design and scale programs to achieve those many goals,” said Nicole Williams, manager, energy efficiency, residential programs, FirstEnergy. “The new Opower Home Energy Reports—with their highly individualized insights, flexible design and continuous learning model—will help engage customers and deliver all the results we need throughout our service territories.”

The new Opower Home Energy Reports are powered by the most complete platform in the industry, empowering utilities to create holistic customer journeys that achieve a wide range of demand side management (DSM) and engagement outcomes. For more information listen to the results National Grid has already achieved with the reimagined HER here.

New engagement innovations can help everyone save

Opower has sent nearly a billion reports on behalf of its utility clients since it pioneered the HER in 2007. This milestone represents more than 3,300 collective program years of experience geared to optimize paper, digital and combination programs. Collectively, these reports have resulted in utility customers saving more than 25 terawatt-hours of energy, enough to power all the households in Dallas, Texas for 3.5 years or stream 125 billion videos. But as customers and challenges evolve, so must the techniques to reach and solve them.

Backed by new advancements in behavioral science, artificial intelligence (AI) and appliance-level disaggregation, the new Opower HER delivers better outcomes by providing truly personalized insights for every type of customer through:

• Ever-evolving experiences: One-size (or color) certainly does not fit all. Dynamic and changing HER layouts are designed to catch and maintain customer attention, including those who have been receiving the same HERs for years. This includes being able to size and strategically place certain insights and icons for maximum exposure and action. With better use of color and visual appeal, the reports provide a poster-like format that the entire household can understand and use to make smarter energy choices.
• Unique energy journeys: The reimagined HERs enable utilities to tailor outreach to connect with a diverse audience and autonomously optimize the experience for each customer by the channel and content they receive. For instance, when Opower detects an EV charging in the home, the customer is sent recommendations on the best times to charge. Variable rate customers see peak pricing insights. Limited income customers receive low and no-cost recommendations. The adaptability of the platform allows utilities to use paper reports to engage hard-to-reach customers and lead them to sustained engagement through digital channels over time. By delivering the right energy insight and recommendation through the right channel every time, the new Opower HERs help utilities deliver more customer value, influence buying behaviors, and increase intended results.
• Agility to experiment: The flexible nature of the new Opower HER makes it a large-scale laboratory for testing and carefully measuring new behavioral techniques and consumer engagement tactics. New Opower platform capabilities enable faster, easier, more cost-effective pilots that extend beyond print and email HERs. For example, The Opower X team recently created a first-of-its-kind video energy report pilot with National Grid. Customers received personalized, animated insights on their usage and advice on how to save and cut costs. The project yielded 12 times the average click-through rates than standard digital reports.
• New behavioral science techniques: While the HER neighbor comparison has been central to getting people to act, sustaining engagement over time demands varying approaches. The new generation of HER continues to innovate with new behavioral techniques to get customers to take that next step or leap, including offering:
   
  • “Efficiency Zones” – a new take on normative comparisons that compares a customer’s energy use to a target zone, rather than to similar efficient homes.
  • “Energy Use Benchmarks” – indicates a customer’s relative level of efficiency in a simple way at the top of the report.
  • “Moments of Pride” – congratulates customers for taking an action, motivating them to be even more energy efficient.

“For more than ten years, Opower has been instrumental in engaging our customers through a range of behavioral techniques and communications channels,” said Amanda Janaskie, manager energy efficient programs, Baltimore Gas & Electric. “We’ve been an early adopter of many Opower innovations, so it was natural to be one of the first to deploy these new reports. They will be instrumental in delivering on our commitment to provide customers with personalized experiences that help save energy and money.”

“Our ability to make every report a new experience for all types of customers not only delivers industry-leading results, but it also creates a testbed for trying new behavioral techniques and engagement strategies,” said Scott Neuman, GVP of Oracle Utilities Opower. “Our reimagined HER is a major leap forward that allows utilities to execute successful programs and help build our clean energy future right now.”

Chubu Electric Power Grid Co., Inc. (President & Director, Yaoji Ichikawa) has rolled out seven million smart meters with Oracle Meter Data Management (MDM). This milestone is part of the utility’s larger initiative to achieve 10 million connected residential and commercial properties by 2023.

In 2014, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) mandated the liberation of the electricity market to provide a stable supply of energy, curb energy charges and create an open retail market that provides choice for customers. Following METI’s decision, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. decided to implement a smart meter system and plans to roll it out to all customers by 2023.

Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. serves the Chubu region of Japan, including the Aichi, Mie, Gifu, Nagano, and Shizuoka. The utility’s mission is to deliver a stable supply of high quality energy in a safe and reasonable form to deliver on the realization of a low-carbon society.

With the data from its existing smart meters, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. is better able to visualize energy usage to both improve the efficiency of power generation and power transmission facilities and better serve its customers. For example, the utility can use meter data to see when a customer is reaching their target energy usage and alert them. Likewise, the utility can see how much energy a household has used from its rooftop solar PV and allow customers to divert excess energy to a family member.

With the smart meter data, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. can enable electricity retailers in the Chubu region by being able to continually refine and improve service including fee calculation and flexible pricing menu proposals. This could include implementing Time of Use (TOU) rates to support the efficient use of electric power by customers while reducing energy load during peak demand times.

“Serving our customers and reducing energy are key goals and ones we can’t achieve without continuous data,” said Mr. Takuya Kajikawa, General Manager of Distribution Control Engineering Group, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co., Inc. “Oracle’s experience in managing large scale smart meter rollouts has been critical in helping us achieve key milestones in this project and in helping utilize smart meter data to improve both operational efficiency and how we engage our customers.”

Based on its proven track record of successful smart meter implementations across the globe, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. chose Oracle Utilities to kick off its smart meter program in 2013, with pilots starting the following year. Today, Oracle operates as the infrastructure for the company’s smart meter control management system. Most recently, Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. is upgrading to a newer version of Oracle MDM as it moves from seven million to 10 million smart meters.

Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. also uses Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway (SGG) to centralize advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) data and create a common connection among utility applications and smart grid devices. For example, with data flowing to an electricity retailer’s customer information system in regular intervals, they can simplify customer billing. Chubu Electric Power Grid Co. can also submit remote commands to the smart meter to perform operations such as connect/disconnect service to a household or set an energy load limit without deploying a field worker. Additionally, SGG significantly reduces the cost and complexity of introducing new devices, data streams, and business processes.

Panino Giusto has been a staple of the Italian restaurant scene since 1979 priding itself on having helped brought the panini to the world. It currently operates in five countries with a store on almost every major street in Milan and plans to significantly increase its business in the coming years. In January 2020 Panino Giusto became a Certified B® Corporation, the first in the Italian food service industry. While Italy was one of the hardest-hit regions during the current health crisis, restaurants are finally being permitted to slowly reopen among heavy restrictions. Panino Giusto is embracing technology, including Oracle MICROS Simphony Point-of-Sale to help pivot and deliver a safer, pleasurable experience to customers.

“Our mission has always been to bring everyone a slice of Italian life while respecting the individual and the environment. Now more than ever we want to protect our customers and staff,” said Antonio Civita, CEO of Panino Giusto. “Technology is helping us to reimagine our restaurants and our customers’ experience without losing any of the quality and warmth they have come to know and love.” 

With Simphony as its central information hub, Panino Giusto is introducing several new options and operating models to drive revenue, preserve margins and deliver a high-quality consumer experience. Oracle collaborated with Smart Technologies Limited, Get Your Bill and Tas Group, to help Panino reimagine every part of the business from delivery processes that intelligently use in-house staff or aggregators based on business objectives, to multiple options for contactless payment and pickup that minimize wait times.

Step one was extending Panino’s loyalty app, My Panino Giusto, so customers could order, pay and account for their loyalty points all in one place. While this project normally would have taken months, Oracle, Smart Technologies and the other partners had it completed in just weeks.

“Oracle moved quickly to mobilize a partner network that allowed us to navigate the crisis and prepare for the rebound,” added Civita. “Patrons will now be able to order and prepay for dine-in or take out, and payment will be tokenized so customers can be identified by their loyalty program membership to accumulate or redeem rewards with no additional effort. We could not have done this so fast without Oracle’s and our other partners amazing support and service.”

Orders from the app go directly into Simphony, helping ensure they are queued quickly and timed based on delivery or pick-up—even accounting for the distance from a Panino location the order will be delivered. The next phase in the evolution of their customer experience will be allowing customers to pre-book tables and orders to ensure easy, contactless service and social-distancing based on local guidelines. All of this helps Panino better manage inventory and kitchen costs by gaining deeper data insights into what customers are ordering and when.

“We have seen exceptional resilience from restaurateurs across the globe,” said Simon de Montfort Walker, Oracle Food and Beverage SVP and GM. “Panino Giusto was fast to recognize the need for a digital transformation mindset and tackled that head-on with thoughtful and inventive ideas. Oracle is inspired to be part of a collaborative team using technology to test new concepts, assess effectiveness and adjust accordingly.”

Electronic Data Capture (EDC) is no longer sufficient for today’s clinical trials, which are incorporating more virtual components and becoming more decentralized. While traditional EDC systems capture data from forms, patient data in clinical trials is now flowing at a rapid pace and at a high volume from a myriad of novel sources, such as wearables. To address this challenge, Oracle Health Sciences, an early pioneer in eClinical technology, has introduced Clinical One Data Collection Cloud Service. With the ability to capture data from any source into a single, unified platform, Oracle Clinical One is redefining how technology supports clinical research to improve efficiency and help speed the delivery of breakthrough therapies.

“The Oracle Clinical One platform is a game-changer,” said Michele Taylor-Scott, head of data management at Health Decisions. “We have used Clinical One for stand-alone randomization and trial supply management and are excited to now be able to use it for data collection. Clinical One is very user-friendly and we feel it will enable us to reduce not only database build timelines, but also database lock timelines, which are both critical in clinical trials. I say that with confidence because with Clinical One, we have the ability to build a full study in a matter of weeks, instead of months, and mid-study changes or post-production changes can be done in real-time without a lengthy migration process.”

Current eClinical technology has not kept pace with the acceleration of science and clinical research which drives up trial costs. According to Gartner’s 2020 Industry Vision report, “the current rate of trial cost increase is unsustainable, and clinical leaders must challenge the existing model and enable new approaches to take hold.”¹

Oracle Clinical One Data Collection collects data from any source – forms, wearable sensors, patient apps, electronic health records (EHR), labs—and harmonizes it in a single place. This expanded data gives sites and study teams a more complete picture of the patient’s experience, and ultimately, the safety and efficacy of the investigative therapy, allowing them to make better decisions. And, because Clinical One is a unified platform, sites can randomize, dispense drug, and collect patient data in one system.

“Using Oracle Clinical One will have a positive impact on our data collection and randomization processes for current and future clinical trials as we help bring new women’s health therapies to market,” added Taylor-Scott.

Because it is easily configurable, Clinical One Data Collection meets the needs of all trial types—from the simplest Phase I and Post-Market studies to the most complex Phase III studies, across all therapeutic areas. For example, Clinical One is already being used across the industry for many trials including those focused on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines.

“The industry has been asking for technology that supports a new way to approach clinical trials that is simpler, easier, and lower cost, but also accommodates the evolving needs of decentralized trials. To meet this need, we, as an industry, must think and act differently,” said Steve Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Health Sciences. “Our goal is to deliver on this promise by providing the industry with a unified platform that supports today’s needs as well as tomorrow’s requirements. Clinical One Data Collection supports event-based data collection and streamlines workflow, providing our customers with the agility and cost-savings they need to get therapies to market faster.”

To learn more about Oracle Health Sciences Clinical One Data Collection and to see the capability in action, please join the live webinar on June 23, 2020 at 11:00am ET – register here.

Recently, Oracle also announced its Clinical One Randomization and Supplies Management Cloud Service, which reduces the time required for study set up from nearly two months to just a few days. For more information about Clinical One:

https://www.oracle.com/clinical-one

1 Gartner, Industry Vision: Life Science CIOs Must Transform Clinical Development With Digital Trials Refreshed 15 January 2020, Published 21 August 2018

With a dependence on highly reactive, legacy communications security solutions, contact centers and enterprises are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated infrastructure attacks. To mitigate these threats, Oracle has launched the Oracle Communications Security Shield (OCSS) Cloud, a real-time communications security solution. Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the solution uses artificial intelligence and the real-time enforcement capabilities of Oracle Communications Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) to determine the risk of session initiated protocol-based communications crossing an enterprise’s network. By quickly detecting malicious call signatures and behavioral anomalies, the OCSS Cloud can autonomously mitigate dangerous network threats.

“Organizations that use AI-driven behavioral threat analytics and cloud-based defenses, and that focus on communications and collaboration threats, can contain attacks 42% to 68% faster,” says Johna Till Johnson, chief executive officer and founder of Nemertes Research. According to Nemertes' Cybersecurity and Cloud 2019-2020 Research Study, modern cybersecurity requires a holistic, automated security approach that can both analyze data and enforce policies in real-time.

Legacy security solutions offer limited protection due to their dependence on static rule-based decision processes, passwords and knowledge-based answers, making enterprises a prime target for criminals and ill-equipped to take on Day-Zero attacks. Oracle’s Communications Security Shield Cloud integrates advanced behavioral analytics, anomaly detection and caller-reputation scoring to dynamically assess incoming call risk. By monitoring this activity, enterprises can protect their productivity, reputation and the bottom line through:

• Dynamic risk assessment: Calls are inspected, analyzed and assessed quickly and efficiently though advanced analytics, AI/ML and security capabilities such as user behavioral analytics, threat signature detection and anomaly detection.
• 360° visibility: A comprehensive, intuitive dashboard provides business intelligence driven data visualization of real-time communications traffic, including an overview of actionable insights for mitigating threats and traffic anomalies.
• Real-time enforcement: Customizable enforcement policies ensure the alignment of mitigation behaviors with organizations’ risk appetites.

Together, these capabilities enable real-time communications traffic designed to be secure from cyber threats, such as telephony denial of service attacks, nuisance calls, theft of service, traffic pumping and account takeovers.

“Security threats to real-time enterprise communications—especially unified communications and contact centers—continue to rise,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications, Networks. “With the latest in cloud-based AI/ML capabilities, behavioral threat analytics and signature anomaly detection methods, the Oracle Communications Security Shield Cloud is a critical service to secure today’s enterprise network.”

To learn more about Oracle Communications industry solutions, visit: Oracle Communications LinkedIn, or join the conversation at Twitter @OracleComms.

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) today announced fiscal 2020 Q4 and fiscal 2020 full year results. Total quarterly revenues were $10.4 billion, down 6% YoY and down 4% in constant currency compared to Q4 last year. Cloud services and license support revenues were $6.8 billion, up 1% YoY and 3% in constant currency. Cloud license and on-premise license revenues were $2.0 billion.

Q4 GAAP operating income was up 1% YoY to $4.3 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 41%. Non-GAAP operating income was down 2% YoY to $5.1 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 49%. GAAP net income was $3.1 billion, and non-GAAP net income was $3.8 billion. GAAP earnings per share was $0.99, while non-GAAP earnings per share was up 3% YoY to $1.20.

Short-term deferred revenues were $8.0 billion. Operating cash flow was $13.1 billion during the trailing twelve months.

For fiscal 2020, total revenues were $39.1 billion, down 1% YoY and flat in constant currency. Cloud services and license support revenues were $27.4 billion, up 3% YoY and 4% in constant currency. Cloud license and on-premise license revenues were $5.1 billion.

Fiscal 2020 GAAP operating income was $13.9 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 36%. Non-GAAP operating income was $17.4 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 44%. GAAP net income was $10.1 billion, while non-GAAP net income was $12.7 billion. GAAP earnings per share increased 4% to $3.08, while non-GAAP earnings per share was up 9% to $3.85.

“In Q4, non-GAAP earnings per share grew 5% in constant currency driven by strong performances in both our cloud infrastructure and cloud applications businesses,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. “Leading the way was our Fusion Cloud ERP Suite that grew 35% in constant currency, and our Fusion Cloud HCM Suite grew 29% in constant currency. Our overall business did remarkably well considering the pandemic, but our results would have been even better except for customers in the hardest-hit industries that we serve such as hospitality, retail, and transportation postponing some of their purchases. Still, for the third year in a row, we delivered double-digit constant currency earnings per share growth in FY20.”

“In Q4, we launched a vastly improved version of our Exadata Cloud@Customer service,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “Exadata Cloud@Customer now enables our existing on-premise database customers to run the Oracle Autonomous Database in their own datacenter; previously, the Oracle Autonomous Database was only available in Oracle’s Gen2 Public Cloud.  Enabling all our on-premise database customers to upgrade and run Oracle’s latest and best database technology in their own data center should dramatically accelerate the rate of adoption of the Oracle Autonomous Database…especially by our largest customers including banks and governments that are not currently planning to move their largest and most critical systems to a public cloud.”

The board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.24 per share of outstanding common stock. This dividend will be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on July 15, 2020, with a payment date of July 28, 2020.

Q4 Fiscal 2020 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast

Oracle will hold a conference call and webcast today to discuss these results at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. You may listen to the call by dialing (816) 287-5563, Passcode: 425392. To access the live webcast, please visit the Oracle Investor Relations website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. In addition, Oracle’s Q4 results and fiscal 2020 financial tables are available on the Oracle Investor Relations website.

A replay of the conference call will also be available by dialing (855) 859-2056 or (404) 537-3406, Passcode: 1424537.

Today’s startups are born in the cloud. That means their choice of cloud provider is of the utmost importance.

What do startups look for when evaluating cloud providers? Value, performance, and security are some of the most crucial factors—and they’re just a few of the many reasons startups choose Oracle.

Here, members of the Oracle for Startups program explain why they made the decision to use Oracle Cloud and the benefits they’ve seen:

Cost Savings

The cost of technology infrastructure impedes startup growth. By moving to Oracle Cloud, startups can save money in this area and reinvest it back into the business. One such example is bot and AI platform provider BotSupply, which is expanding across EMEA with the help of Oracle, according to CEO and Co-Founder Asser Smidt.

Oracle has some of the most transparent and value-based pricing in the market, said Smidt, whose company joined the startup program in April 2018.

“I know exactly what I'm paying for—no surprises,” he said.

Scalability

Another way startups can save money in the cloud is by avoiding spend on unused infrastructure. The cloud allows companies to scale up or down to meet fluctuating customer demand, paying only for the resources they use. And Oracle Cloud allows companies to do so reliably, with performance, availability, and manageability backed by enterprise service-level agreements.

"We process billions of data points daily and we can't afford any latency or downtime," said Guy Mounier, CEO and cofounder of sales development startup AptivIO, which joined the startup program in July 2019. "Oracle Cloud gives us the assurance we need to deliver value to our customers and to keep innovating with confidence."

Security

Earning and keeping customers' trust is essential for startup growth. Partnering with Oracle, which has more than 40 years of enterprise expertise, gives startups an additional level of credibility when talking to prospects and working with customers. And the security-first architecture of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports that, according to Mark Ross, cofounder of high-performance computing (HPC) startup GridMarkets, which joined the startup program in January 2019.

“We can now say GridMarkets is backed by the highly secure and highly robust Oracle Cloud, and that’s helping to open even more doors for us across the globe,” he said.

Openness

Modern developers rely on a variety of platforms, languages, and services to build their applications. If their cloud of choice doesn’t support their tools of choice, it can cause major headaches.

Openness and open source support are important factors for startups that have migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

"One of the key reasons we were excited to move from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was Oracle's renewed focus on utilizing, and contributing to, open source projects," said Jonathan Girven, CTO of video collaboration platform provider Sauce.

Sauce became a member of Oracle for Startups in July 2018, and Oracle acquired the company in April 2020.

High-Performance Computing

The cloud allows startups to compete against large enterprises in fields that involve the storage, processing, and analysis of massive amounts of data. Think biomedical research, video streaming, and advanced engineering.

But not all clouds are equal when it comes to HPC. Startups in the Oracle for Startups program, such as analytics platform provider Kinetica, which joined in August 2019, have chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to meet their heavy HPC demands.

"Oracle has world-class GPU instances that deliver power, performance, and scalability," said Daniel Raskin, CMO of Kinetica.

Learn more about how Oracle helps startups.

When COVID-19 hit, Oklahoma, like every other state, had to figure out a way for its mostly office-based government employees to work from home. Office workers unfamiliar with configuring IT gear without hands-on support invariably had issues and questions. Before COVID-19, the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise IT desk fielded about 500 support calls a month. Overnight, that number spiked to more than 1,500 calls per day, says Jerry Moore, CIO, State of Oklahoma. They needed a solution and fast.

Within eight days of receiving a call for help, the Oracle team in Oklahoma and members of Oracle’s Austin-based Cloud Solutions Hub designed and deployed a chatbot to help Oklahoma’s newly home-based workers get productive as quickly as possible.

The chatbot, enabled by Oracle Digital Assistant, lets users ask basic questions, such as how to reset a password, how to set up a VPN, or how to download workplace applications. This quick and easy avenue to answers was instrumental in reducing the volume of calls to the IT helpdesk and getting approximately 30,000 state employees up and running.

During that same period, Oracle also built a mobile app for the state’s Department of Human Services that tracks time and purchases related to COVID-19 work. “If an employee buys 12 cases of hand sanitizer, they can take a picture of the purchase and upload it to the app that tracks all activities specific to the pandemic,” Moore says. “Overall, in eight days Oracle built and delivered two applications. Not only was this an impressive feat, but showed Oracle’s commitment to helping us and our communities run more smoothly in this difficult time.”

These applications help ensure that Oklahoma government workers can keep providing important constituent services, even while working at home.

Find out more about Oracle’s state and local government solutions.

Oracle Workforce Health and Safety

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced HR professionals into some of the most challenging times on record. Whether its adapting to new workforce demands, managing dispersed teams or maintaining positive employee experiences in a time of volatility, HR teams have taken center stage.

But the battle is not over yet. As the road to recovery continues, organizations are now having to figure out how to safely and efficiently bring their employees back into the workplace. And it’s up to HR teams to help make that happen. We at Oracle are here to help.

A few months ago, we announced free access to our Oracle Workforce Health & Safety tool for our HR customers to help keep their employees safe, and we’ve already seen it deliver tremendous value with many customers taking action. But we don’t want to stop there.

To provide additional help for the HR community, we are introducing the Oracle Employee Care Package for the New Workplace: a bundle of HCM tools and technology that will help HR teams make work safer, supportive, smarter, and more human as we re-enter the workplace. Within the Employee Care Package, we address three of the key areas for HR teams as they navigate the return to the work: safety, support, and skills.  

Prioritizing Workforce Safety

As offices begin to reopen, one of the top priorities for HR teams will without a doubt be ensuring the health and safety of their workforce. Which is why we’re including our Oracle Onboarding and Oracle Workforce Health & Safety tools in the Employee Care Package.

• Oracle Workforce Health & Safety allows HR professionals to track and report health incidents within their teams (such as confirmed COVID-19 cases), minimize exposure to the larger workforce, and take appropriate action quickly.

• And Oracle Onboarding ensures that employees who are coming back to the workplace are re-onboarded effectively, aligned with compliance, and set up for success and productivity.

Delivering Employee Support

HR teams will also need to be ready and equipped to deliver a supportive, and positive experience for their teams. Employees will likely be confused, curious, or even a little nervous when returning back to the workplace, and it’s up to HR teams to be their support and deliver confidence. Our Oracle HR Help Desk, Oracle Digital Assistant, and Oracle Work Life tools can help. 

• With Oracle HR Help Desk, organizations can deliver an optimal employee experience by seamlessly managing COVID-19 issues, promptly resolving employee inquiries, and identifying trending issues among the workforce to resolve quickly.

• Oracle Digital Assistant makes it easy for employees to get quick answers to commonly asked questions, whether they’re at home or at work, and through whatever channel they prefer (SMS, voice, social, etc.)

• HR teams can use Oracle Work Life to strengthen their workplace community and empower employees to grow stronger together. This team camaraderie will improve employee productivity and well-being.

Zeroing in on Skills

As we enter into this “new normal,” we will see a heightened importance around employee learning and reskilling as new skills gaps emerge and more roles are ready to be filled.

• With Oracle Learning, HR teams can help employees reskill and readjust to the new workplace. Recommended trainings will help employees improve productivity, acquire new skills, and discover new opportunities.

Now more than ever, HR teams are in the spotlight and driving their organizations to define what’s next. With the right tools in place, HR teams can help their workforce readjust to this changing world. And we’re here to help every step of the way.

For more information about Oracle’s Employee Care Package, click here: http://oracle.com/employee-care-package

Multi-cloud environments are becoming the de-facto cloud strategy among a majority of US businesses that have moved their applications to the cloud, but managing these complex infrastructures is creating new challenges that many companies are struggling to surmount—if they decide to move to the cloud at all.

These are among the key conclusions from a new report by Omdia Consulting, which analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of running workloads in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  

Key findings from the Omdia SWOT report include:

• More than 52% of businesses report the inability to move workloads between clouds is slowing their adoption of cloud computing
• The alliance between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure plans to speed up cloud adoption, by offering businesses direct interconnection between these two clouds, integrating identity management, and honoring a collaborative support agreement
• Oracle’s open, enterprise-grade cloud architecture not only provides businesses with near zero downtime and no cost to onboard and offboard users, it also offers the most comprehensive sets of security standards and customer support services compared to competing cloud vendors

While most cloud infrastructure vendors offer companies an environment on which to run their mission-critical applications without having to manage a data center, invest in hardware, or install and update software, those vendors’ service, pricing, and support plans can vary widely.

In its recently published SWOT Assessment of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Omdia Consulting offers new insight into why companies should consider running their mission-critical workloads in the Oracle Cloud.   

Because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has built a reputation for reliability, companies are guaranteed more than 99.99% availability uptime, and fewer than four minutes per month for maintenance work, the report says.

Such high availability is particularly important, because banks that can’t process high-speed financial transactions or retailers who aren’t able to synchronize their ecommerce websites with their on-hand inventories and point-of-sale data, can lose revenue, frustrate customers, and damage their brands.

Mastering Multi-Cloud Environments

As an increasing number of businesses today live in a multi-cloud world, it’s important for cloud vendors to integrate their offerings with those of their competitors.

The Oracle and Microsoft alliance announced in June 2019 enables joint customers to deploy mission-critical enterprise workloads that span both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environments.

Such customers can run Azure analytics and AI, for example with Oracle Autonomous Database on the same workload. This not only makes it easier for companies to have a backup cloud to aid in disaster recovery, but also to split up workloads so that data architects and application developers can choose their preferred environments and tools.

The Oracle and Microsoft alliance also removes the burden of managing multiple service orders, networking configurations, and data transfers from different clouds across workloads.

Raising The Bar For Security Standards

The range of standards that Oracle provides compliance with is one of the most comprehensive among the leading cloud providers, according to Omdia’s SWOT report.

While currently compliant with ISO 27001, SOC1, SOC2, PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP Medium, and FedRAMP High, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also follows a media destruction process adhering to NIST SP 800-88r1 and DoD emergency destruction and secret classification standards.

A new feature in Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud is Isolated Network Virtualization, which isolates physical network interfaces and cards from each other, isolating an attacker who has gained unauthorized access to the network. Through this process, Oracle helps companies protect against bad actors from attacking their networks when an instance, bare-metal, virtual-machine, or container, has been compromised.

Gaining Share Through Human Customer Support

While all cloud infrastructure vendors let their customers access online documentation and community forums for free, many of those vendors charge hefty fees for hands-on, expert support—like the kind you’ll need to fix a latency problem or network outage.

But companies running their workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Tier, can get an enterprise-level support package, which includes two Oracle Autonomous Databases with powerful tools like Oracle Application Express (APEX) and Oracle SQL Developer, two Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute virtual machines, block, object, and archive storage, load balancer and data egress, and monitoring and modifications—for free.

It’s this kind of human customer care that has driven approximately 80% of Oracle’s customers to stay in the Oracle Cloud for between one and three years, and 21% of them committing to three-year subscriptions, according to Omdia’s SWOT analysis. The report also shows more than 50% of Oracle’s customers increase their spend once they have moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and the rate of new customers moving to Oracle Cloud is more than 150% year on year.

This level premium support, including zero fees for onboarding or offboarding customers to its eponymous Cloud Infrastructure, demonstrates Oracle’s strong commitment to be an open enterprise-grade cloud—earning its position as a top-five cloud provider in the world.

We live in a multi-cloud world and customers expect cloud providers to excel at interconnecting various platforms, applications, and workloads. Omdia’s report highlights several critical elements that make Oracle uniquely qualified to provide this interconnectivity, while offering exceptional performance, pricing, and support.

Click here for more Industry Analyst Research.

Watch the video

National Grid is helping its customers better understand their energy journey, 90-seconds at a time. In partnership with Oracle Utilities Opower, National Grid launched a pilot of their first-ever video energy reports. In an animated story, customers received personalized insights on their natural gas usage last winter and advice on how to save energy and cut costs. Sent to 33,000 customers in Upstate New York via email in February, the videos netted 12X the average click-through rate of Opower’s standard digital energy reports. See a sample here.

“National Grid’s mission is to provide clean energy to support our world long into the future,” said Thomas Baron, senior program manager at National Grid. “Together with Opower, we have continued to innovate and refine how we engage our customers and bring them along this critical journey. Personalized videos make it fun and easy for customers to make smart energy choices.”

The National Grid videos were created by the new Opower X professional services team. Opower X projects are all designed to deliver new, measurable customer engagement value to utilities. In the case of the National Grid videos, two-thirds of viewers watched all personalized content, and 14 percent of them clicked through to National Grid’s Energy Savings Programs page for more opportunities and information.

From door hangers to digital engagement

For more than 10 years, National Grid and Opower have experimented with new ways of engaging utility customers. Years ago, that meant testing mailed door hangers and phone calls as behavioral nudges for customers to choose efficient heating and cooling setpoints. Together, the companies have evolved the use of behavioral techniques for influencing digital engagement and scaling adoption of utility programs in New York and Massachusetts. They proved how non-AMI high bill alerts deliver net new behavioral energy savings in Rhode Island. And recently, National Grid and Opower are running a unique behavioral demand response program in Clifton Park, NY, where customers receive points and rewards in exchange for reducing energy use on critical peak days.

With the success of National Grid’s pilot, the Opower X team plans to test the limits of what is possible with personalized videos: driving adoption of deep energy efficiency measures like heat pumps, educating customers about pricing plans and utility bills, and helping customers find and use all their utilities’ tools for digital self-service.

“National Grid continues to push the envelope on customer engagement. In so many cases, they have been the first to initiate, innovate and improve how they serve customers and the planet,” said Paul McDonald, senior director of industry strategy at Oracle Utilities. “With the popularity of video today, especially in apps like Instagram Stories and TikTok, video energy reports just make sense. We’re excited about what’s possible with video, and it’s just one example of how we are changing everything about the Opower Home Energy Report experience.”

National Grid will also be an early adopter of Opower’s bold new print and digital Home Energy Reports this spring. Learn more about the redesigned reports and how they will power the next era in behavioral engagement here.