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.

Oracle today announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. May 2020 report, The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2020.

This year’s report evaluated 13 email marketing service providers based on 23 criteria, which are split into three categories—current offering, strategy, and market presence. Of the providers evaluated, Oracle Responsys, part of Oracle Cloud Customer Experience (CX), was one of only four Leaders. In addition to scoring highest in the strategy category, Oracle Responsys also received the highest possible score in the artificial intelligence, analytics, and vertical capabilities criteria.

According to the report, “Oracle data assets and analytics modules extend the utility of Responsys. Client references get more than what they pay for. They and their staff all seem excited by the vendor’s vision to ‘drive revenue growth by delivering a relevant, timely, and connected experience wherever and whenever a customer chooses.’” The report also notes, “Oracle consistently delivers scale. It has a significant global footprint, industry-specific data schemas, and AI that runs off of email and non-email data, rivaling personalization-specialist competitors.”

“We are incredibly proud to be named a Leader in this year’s The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2020,” said Shashi Seth, SVP, Oracle Cloud CX Marketing. “Responsys is at the core of our digital marketing suite and provides the perfect foundation for multi-channel, data-driven, and real-time customer engagements that will define the future of marketing. We believe Forrester’s evaluation further validates our commitment to delivering stand-out, innovative products and services to our customers.”

Part of Oracle Cloud Applications, Oracle Cloud CX helps marketing, sales, service, and commerce professionals reduce IT complexity, deliver innovative customer experiences, and achieve predictable and tangible business results. Many of the top brands across the globe, including Comcast, The New York Times, Callaway Golf, and Frontier Airlines, have used Oracle Responsys to grow revenues, relationships, recommendations, and reputations.

Download The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2020 here.

Oracle Financial Services has made its in-memory graph visualization tool, Investigation Hub, available in its enterprise case management application and in other third-party AML case managers. Investigators can interactively scrutinize money laundering networks and apply graph analytics to increase the effectiveness of their investigations. Unlike point solutions, this capability also saves on technology integration costs and the need for additional training on new tools.

Research firm Gartner named graph analytics, which is “a set of analytic techniques that shows how entities such as people, places and things are related to each other,” a top trend last year. Many financial institutions are eager to apply this exciting technology—and the visualizations it enables—to better identify hidden criminal networks. At the same time, as regulatory and compliance burdens increase, financial institutions require tools that allow their anti-money laundering (AML) investigators to work as efficiently as possible.

“At Oracle, we are democratizing advanced technologies like graph analytics by making them available in our applications,” said John Edison, vice president, Financial Crime and Compliance Management Products, Oracle Financial Services. “Now, AML professionals, from junior analysts to senior investigators, can explore in-memory graph visualizations without disrupting their workflow. This saves time and leads to smarter decisions, as analysts and investigators have all the tools, information and context they need in one place.”

In addition to the new integration, Oracle also made recent enhancements to its Investigation Hub to help analysts quickly understand both complex criminal networks and normal customer behavior. This allows AML professionals to disposition cases faster and with more accuracy. The recent enhancements include:

• Enhanced Entity Resolution: Allows institutions to gain a 360-degree picture of their customers and external entities alike by identifying different instances of the same entity across data sources.
• Network Evolution: Time-lapse visualization of how a network changes over time helps AML analysts rapidly understand and contextualize transaction flows and customer activity.
• On-Demand Integration with Third-Party Data: Enriches analytics by providing access to risk ratings and factors extracted from structured and unstructured external and internal data sources.

Global financial institutions continue to select Oracle for its enterprise-grade anti-financial crime platform, which is regulator-accepted and based on a common data foundation that takes inputs from any transaction system. This “single source of truth” enables data science teams to consume data and leverage advanced analytics to monitor, detect and investigate as needed. With Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management, compliance teams can also increase overall program effectiveness and optimize compliance operations at scale.

On this World Bee Day, it’s frightening to think what the world would be like without bees. A number of news stories recently have investigated the decline in bee populations and the likely impact this will have on our food supply and the environment. Considering bees pollinate 70% of the world’s major food crops and 87% of all flowering plants, the prospect of the extinction of these fascinating creatures is unthinkable.

Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of just how vital bees are and many organisations are focused on increasing our knowledge and understanding. One organisation that has stood out for me is The World Bee Project CIC. They are a community interest company delving deep into the data collected from beehives to help not only beekeepers, but also researchers and scientists around the world, to gain new insights and find science-based solutions to biodiversity decline and climate change mitigation. This is a certainly a purpose-driven brand, with the expertise to back up the sustainability promise.

Global understanding and global reach

The World Bee Project is using IoT big-data-driven, smart-hive technology to create a Global Hive Network that touches on billions of rows of data points every day. That depth of insight is arming communities with the knowledge to determine strategies that can improve pollinator habitats and create more sustainable ecosystems for bees.

The work we are doing with The World Bee Project includes bringing this data to life with analytics and visualisation, fuelled by AI, machine learning and natural language processing. What’s interesting is this critical area of scientific research is helping businesses to gain new insights from their own data too.

What we learned about bee behaviour from The World Bee Project became a story about data analytic techniques that businesses can apply. In fact, businesses and bees have a lot more in common than you’d think, as the bees demonstrated during my presentation at Oracle OpenWorld Middle East: Dubai. You can take a look at a video of my presentation here, including some rather nice augmented reality magic that takes us inside the hive itself.

Bee to bee to B2B

The World Bee Project uses hive monitoring technology that senses brood temperature, hive weight, humidity, acoustics and the weather conditions around the hive. Although brood temperature and hive weight are key performance indicators—telling us the bee colony is healthy and the queen is laying eggs, as well as how much honey the hive is producing—the other metrics can tell us a lot more about bee behaviour and the impact of climate.

The same applies to a business. If you only monitor key performance indicators, you could be missing out on the wider context and early signs that things aren’t going well.

For example, The World Bee Project uses predictive intelligence to forecast when a colony is about to swarm. When the colony gets too big for the existing hive, up to half the colony and its queen leave to establish a new home. The analysis of acoustic data identified behaviour patterns in the bees up to three weeks before this occurs. It was amazing to learn that we can detect when a colony is about to swarm by listening for the nurse bees when they put their queen on a diet so that she is fit to fly!

Businesses can use predictive intelligence in the same way to identify patterns of behaviour that may indicate a customer or employee is dissatisfied, to reinforce more effective customer or talent retention strategies. This is just one example of real-time and near-real-time smart data analysis that could transform how businesses succeed in the digital age.

Other examples that I cover in more detail in my Dubai presentation include next-generation threat detection and capturing data effectively out in the field using audio chatbots.

Using your collective intelligence

The greatest potential for benefit that we see from our work with The World Bee Project CIC is the value of collective intelligence that the Global Hive Network will bring. When the data from hives in different environments and continents can be captured securely and integrated with third-party data—and made freely available to beekeepers, scientists and researchers around the world—we can make serious advances in understanding the relationship between the health of bees and the health of our environments.

The same can be true of a collaborative business ecosystem, with valuable data and analytics accessible across your organisation and beyond.

Get more information on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure here and find out more about The World Bee Project CIC here.

“Here comes the pitch. It’s a deep drive. This one’s got a chaaaance… and it’s gone!,” exclaims the announcer, “Touchdown, Cubs!”

Using football metrics in a baseball context is jarring and confusing, as it doesn’t explain what is actually happening. That same disconnect is the reality for cross-platform advertisers, who have faced a similar challenge in trying to measure deduplicated audience reach across TV and digital channels, as each medium has historically had its own rules and measurement methodologies.

To solve this issue, which is one of advertising’s most intractable problems, we are expanding our Moat Measurement suite with Oracle Data Cloud to include Moat Reach, a tool that shows near real-time audience reach across digital, mobile, and TV.

Moat Reach integrates Moat Analytics’ digital impression data with second-by-second TV ad viewership data from iSpot.tv against the people and households in the Oracle ID Graph, allowing marketers to measure valid and viewable impressions for the audiences that matter to them across TV and digital channels.

The centerpiece of Moat Reach is an intuitive interface that displays unified people-based metrics for audience reach and frequency across all types of media. Using Moat Reach, advertisers can ensure their message is being seen by their intended audiences, including reach across advanced audience segments like interest, purchase or first-party data, plus standard audiences like demographics.

For example, a CPG advertiser can use Moat Reach to measure the unique, people-based reach of its new soft drink campaign using the same metrics across all of its TV and digital channels. Even better, it can also measure its audience based on custom or first-party segments, like soft drink buyers or frequent shoppers, as well as analyzing key demographics like age, gender, and household composition through each channel.

By comparing the reach, frequency, and viewability of its ads through each channel, the CPG advertiser might discover that it was reaching more of its intended audience via celebrity magazine websites than DIY cable channels, for example, and adjust its media strategy to invest more in those channels.

"Demonstrating the value and scale of our audience to our advertiser partners is critical to our business,” said Nicole Lesko, SVP Data, Ad Platforms and Monetization at Meredith Digital. “By leveraging Moat Reach, we were able to provide a more comprehensive, deduplicated view of how our properties put advertiser messages in front of relevant people, and further validate and enrich the performance of our partners.”

To connect TV and digital audiences, Moat Reach integrates robust TV ad viewership data from iSpot, which uses 14 million opted-in TV devices to identify, extract, and catalog TV ads as they air. iSpot’s TV ad measurement system is able to verify audience for ads across linear, VOD and CTV viewing. By using Moat’s award-winning attention analytics technology, Moat Reach also helps ensure every impression is valid, viewable, and fraud-free.

“Moat has always set the gold standard for digital ad verification, and they served as a model when we developed iSpot’s measurement approach,” said Sean Muller, CEO at iSpot. “Integrating our capabilities really gives brands unprecedented visibility and newfound capabilities that will help make smarter decisions. We’re delighted to work with Moat by Oracle Data Cloud to provide brands with the most reliable reach and audience verification system on the market.”

After years of cross-channel confusion, Moat Reach gives marketers a self-service tool to measure the consolidated reach and frequency of their campaigns, so they can see whether they reached their intended audiences via each platform, publisher, and network on a consolidated and de-duplicated basis.

For more information about Moat Reach or to request a demo, please visit Moat.com.

As IT professionals know, figuring out the true cost of cloud computing is difficult at best, maddening at worst. There are so many variables in CPUs, memory, storage, and network bandwidth that figuring out what your proposed workload will cost in the cloud can be an exercise in futility.

And, to compound the problem, many costs may not be apparent at the start but cause sleepless nights once manifested.

It’s an open secret in cloud computing circles that getting data into a given cloud is cheap—in fact, it is usually free. But getting data out is a completely different story. Traditional cloud vendors charge hefty premiums on data flowing out—or what they call data egress.

So how can we take the mystery out of what a given cloud implementation will cost when it’s actually used by the business? How about a cloud calculator that assesses the price of resources you need to meet your requirements before actual deployment? 

Meet the Oracle Cloud Workload Cost Estimator, which Oracle launched this week to help customers assess Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Amazon Web Services with an apples-to-apples comparison (or as close to that as you can get). We think you will be surprised by the results, which show Oracle is a more cost-efficient (cheaper) option for many high-performance applications.

The calculator prices out not only cost of computing and storage, but also IOPS (data input/output per second), and data transmission out of the cloud. That last factor, known as data egress, is often a wild card. That’s because traditional cloud companies charge a markup after a given amount of data flows out. So once you hit that magic monthly number—1 GB for AWS—data egress charges kick in. At Oracle, the meter doesn’t start running until after 10,000 times more data egress—or 10 TB—per month. Furthermore, the unit price for additional data is much lower than that charged by our friends in the Pacific Northwest.

These networking charges are not chump change. And if your company is streaming video (a very data-intensive application) out to thousands of users every day, your video transmission gets pretty pricey pretty fast.

Take 8x8, the video streaming company, as an example. When it ramped up its capabilities to meet soaring demand when the COVID-19 pandemic led to remote working mandates, data egress usage quickly surpassed 1.5 PBs of outbound data per day.

Using the handy Oracle Cloud Workload Estimator, 1.5 PB (or 1,500 TB) of “data out” would cost just over $80,000 using AWS ($80,691 for the nitpickers among us) compared to roughly $13,000 ($12,969) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

See what I mean?

Or, if you have a database or other application that requires very fast data flow from CPU into and out of storage, the workload estimator includes an IOPS module that lets you explore how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stacks up against AWS in this dimension as well.

So, if you are dealing with 10 TB of block storage, AWS logs in at $47,872 per month compared to $609 per month for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. That means Oracle charges 97 percent less for IOPS than the supposed cost leader.

Use the calculator to design your dream implementation (don’t forget to include important workloads) from the ground up and then run your own comparisons. You will find that Oracle Cloud offers the best price performance for many of the most common cloud computing scenarios. We think even AWS stalwarts will be surprised at how much more they will get for their buck with Oracle Cloud.

Data security is creating fear and trust issues for IT professionals, according to the third-annual Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020. The study of 750 cybersecurity and IT professionals across the globe found that a patchwork approach to data security, misconfigured services and confusion around new cloud security models has created a crisis of confidence that will only be fixed by organizations making security part of the culture of their business.

Data Security is Keeping IT Professionals Awake at Night

Demonstrating the fear and trust issues experienced by IT professionals, the study found that IT professionals are more concerned about the security of their company’s data than the security of their own home.

• IT professionals are 3X more concerned about the security of company financials and intellectual property than their home security.
• IT professionals have concerns about cloud service providers; 80 percent are concerned that cloud service providers they do business with will become competitors in their core markets.
• 75 percent of IT professionals view the public cloud as more secure than their own data centers, yet 92 percent of IT professionals do not trust their organization is well prepared to secure public cloud services.
• Nearly 80 percent of IT professionals say that recent data breaches experienced by other businesses have increased their organization’s focus on securing data moving forward.

Legacy Data Security Approaches Leave IT Professionals Playing Whac-A-Mole

IT professionals are using a patchwork of different cybersecurity products to try and address data security concerns, but face an uphill battle as these systems are seldom configured correctly.

• 78 percent of organizations use more than 50 discrete cybersecurity products to address security issues; 37 percent use more than 100 cybersecurity products.
• Organizations who discovered misconfigured cloud services experienced 10 or more data loss incidents in the last year.
• 59 percent of organizations shared that employees with privileged cloud accounts have had those credentials compromised by a spear phishing attack.
• The most common types of misconfigurations are:
  • Over-privileged accounts (37 percent)
  • Exposed web servers and other types of server workloads (35 percent)
  • Lack of multi-factor authentication for access to key services (33 percent)

Shifting Responsibility: Causing More Confusion and More Security Breaches

Organizations are moving more business-critical workloads to the cloud than ever before, but growing cloud consumption has created new blind spots as IT teams and cloud service providers work to understand their individual responsibilities in securing data. This confusion has left IT security teams scrambling to address a growing threat landscape.

• Nearly 90 percent of companies are using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 76 percent are using infrastructure-as-a-service today (IaaS); 50 percent expect to move all their data to the cloud in the next two years.
• Shared responsibility security models are causing confusion; only 8 percent of IT security executives state that they fully understand the shared responsibility security model.
• 70 percent of IT professionals think too many specialized tools are required to secure their public cloud footprint.
• 75 percent of IT professionals have experienced data loss from a cloud service more than once.

It’s Time to Build a Security-First Model

To address increasing data security concerns and trust issues, cloud service providers and IT teams need to work together to build a security-first culture. This includes hiring, training, and retaining skilled IT security professionals, and constantly improving processes and technologies to help mitigate threats in an increasingly expanding digital world.

• 69 percent of organizations report their CISO reactively responds and gets involved in public cloud projects only after a cybersecurity incident has occurred.
• 73 percent of organizations have or plan to hire a CISO with more cloud security skills; over half of organizations (53 percent) have added a brand new role called the Business Information Security Officer (BISO) to collaborate with the CISO and help integrate security culture into the business.
• 88 percent of IT professionals feel that within the next three years, the majority of their cloud will use intelligent and automated patching and updating to improve security.
• 87 percent of IT professionals see AI/ML capabilities as a “must-have” for new security purchases in order to better protect against things like fraud, malware and misconfigurations.

Supporting Quotes

“The lift-and-shift of critical information to the cloud over the last couple of years has shown great promise, but the patchwork of security tools and processes has led to a steady cadence of costly misconfigurations and data leaks. Positive progress is being made, though,” said Steve Daheb, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud. “Adopting tools that leverage intelligent automation to help close the skills gap are on the IT spend roadmap for the immediate future and the C-level is methodically unifying the different lines of business with a security-first culture in mind.”

“In response to the current challenging environment, companies have accelerated the movement of workloads, and associated sensitive data, to the cloud to support a new way of working, and to help optimize cost models. This is exposing existing vulnerabilities and creating new risks,” said Tony Buffomante, Global Co-Leader and U.S. Leader of KPMG LLP’s Cyber Security Services. “To be able to manage that increased threat level in this new reality, it is essential that CISOs build security into the design of cloud migration and implementation strategies, staying in regular communication with the business.”

This year’s report is the first in a 5-part series, with follow-on reports offering insights into research findings on central cloud security topics, including:

• Demystifying the cloud security shared responsibility model
• The business impact of the modern data breach
• Addressing cyber-risk and fraud in the cloud
• The mission of the cloud-centric CISO

NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built for customers running artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), high-performance computing (HPC), and big data workloads in the cloud. To support this important work, Oracle is bringing the newly announced NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU to its Oracle Gen 2 Cloud regions. NVIDIA A100 is the first elastic, multi-instance GPU that unifies training, inference, HPC, and analytics.

When running on Oracle Cloud, the new A100 GPUs will help enterprises unlock more value from their data and innovate faster, enabling important breakthroughs such as testing and developing new medications, building safer airplanes, and quickly sourcing natural resources. 

“Oracle is enhancing what NVIDIA GPUs can do in the cloud,” said Vinay Kumar, vice president, product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “The combination of NVIDIA’s powerful GPU computing platform with Oracle’s bare metal compute infrastructure and low latency RDMA clustered network is extremely compelling for enterprises. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s high-performance file server solutions supply data to the A100 Tensor Core GPUs at unprecedented rates, enabling researchers to find cures for diseases faster and engineers to build safer cars.”

“Our growing collaboration with Oracle is fueling incredible innovations across a wide range of industries and uses,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA. “By integrating NVIDIA’s new A100 Tensor Core GPUs into its cloud service offerings, Oracle is giving innovators everywhere access to breakthrough computing performance to accelerate their most critical work in AI, machine learning, data analytics and high performance computing.”

Next Generation GPU for Next Generation Discoveries

With NVIDIA A100 GPUs, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers acceleration and flexibility for training, inferencing, and analytics. Oracle’s newest GPU bare metal and virtual machine instances will accelerate the time to discovery and empower Oracle customers to solve large problems in science, engineering and business.

Many industries are using HPC technology to advance innovations and manage day-to-day business, including:

• Genomics companies’ workloads include DNA sequencing and protein analysis, popular for ancestry studies, health testing, and the analysis of drug interactions to reduce time to market for new pharmaceutical products.
• Retailers run AI models to analyze customer data and offer targeted purchase recommendations. These workloads benefit from GPU chips because they are tightly coupled with accelerated hardware.
• Media and entertainment companies rely on HPC for animation, special effects rendering, and media transcoding. These tasks are characterized by bursty workloads requiring hundreds or even thousands of nodes running in parallel.
• Financial technology companies run HPC tasks for risk analysis, high frequency trading, and financial modeling. This industry has occasional demands for lots of compute and storage resources, such as when running quarterly reports.
• Automotive companies run complex simulations throughout the design, manufacture, and testing of new vehicles. HPC workloads support computer-aided engineering models for crash testing, simulations, and various types of analyses.
• Oil and gas companies depend on HPC for geological modeling to predict where to find oil and natural gas resources. These jobs require spatial analysis, seismic analysis, and very large data sets.
• Aerospace companies require HPC infrastructure for computational fluid dynamics, such as simulating airflow over airplane wings. These simulations require a lot of nodes, each with lots of CPUs and memory.

NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

• Scales up to clusters of thousands of interconnected servers running GPUs to power the most demanding AI and HPC workloads
• Can partition each A100 GPU into as many as seven GPU instances using its multi-instance GPU feature to optimize utilization, and extend access to more teams and services
• Provides the ability to scale down and partition into virtual GPUs to accommodate workloads that run best in a scaled down architecture
• Advances all major deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch and Caffe
• Operates with more than 650 GPU applications for HPC and AI such as MATLAB, Gaussian and NAMB

The new GPU bare metal shape, BM.GPU4.8, will feature 8 x 40 GB NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, all interconnected via NVIDIA NVLink. The CPU on board has 64 physical cores of AMD Rome processors running at 2.9 GHz. The new bare metal instance has 2,048 GB of memory, 24 TB NVMe, 1.6 Tbps throughput with RDMA provided by Oracle’s Cluster Networking. This new shape will launch with limited availability soon, and will be available globally across Oracle Cloud regions in Europe, US, and JAPAC this summer.

In addition to the bare metal instance shapes, organizations will also be able to deploy virtual machines of one, two or four GPUs per virtual machine.

Accelerating Data Science and AI

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science enables teams of data scientists to easily build, train, and manage models on Oracle Cloud in a collaborative, managed environment. The service supports Python, JupyterLab, and a variety of the most popular open source packages for deep learning (such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch and MXNET), machine learning (such as scikit-learn and xgboost), visualization libraries (such as Plotly, matplotlib), and much more. In a future release, data scientists will be able to access the new NVIDIA A100s on the service to speed up large-scale matrix calculations and parallelize large-scale machine learning and deep learning problems.

In addition, Oracle is enabling data scientists to deploy AI models through a pre-configured Image available from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This Image includes NVIDIA’s Deep Neural Network libraries, common ML/Deep Learning frameworks, Jupyter Notebooks and common Python/R integrated development environments. This Image also includes basic sample data, code for testing, and can be up and running in minutes. Users can deploy this data science and AI Image today using any of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s GPU offerings.

Joint Investment and Innovation in Enterprise AI

Oracle and NVIDIA have been collaborating to bring GPU accelerated computing to developers and customers worldwide. Some examples of this work include integrating CUDA-X libraries into applications created with GraalVM languages, enabling real-time streaming prognostics in the Oracle Cloud with MSET2 (a machine learning method for anomaly detection), enhancing conversational AI with Oracle Digital Assistant, and accelerating data science pipelines through the Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform.

These advancements will enable users to easily unlock their data, and integrate ML and Deep Learning into applications. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enabled by NVIDIA A100 GPUs, data science teams can continue to accelerate successful model deployment and produce enterprise-grade results and performance for predictive analytics to drive positive business outcomes.

Giving Startups World-Class Technology

Also announced today, Oracle for Startups and NVIDIA Inception are giving startups access to two powerful technologies to cloud computing power that is fast, scalable and highly secure. Eligible startups get access to Oracle for Startups program benefits. Startups can receive free Oracle Cloud credits for three months and a 70% discount for up to two years on ongoing cloud services, which can be used on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s GPU portfolio of offerings, such as NVIDIA Tesla V100 and the upcoming NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Existing Oracle for Startups members can also get access to NVIDIA’s Inception program. You can read the announcement here and get started by applying at Oracle for Startups.

Getting Started

Users can get started on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with free credits for premium services such as NVIDIA GPUs. Visit https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ for more information.

Read more about today’s announcement on our blog.

Oracle Cloud HCM

Oracle today announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. May 2020 report, The Forrester Wave™ for Cloud Human Capital Management Suites, Q2 2020. The report evaluated 11 vendors based on 30 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence.

Of the 11 cloud HCM suite providers recognized, Oracle Cloud HCM was one of four Leaders and scored highest in the current offering category.  Oracle Cloud HCM also received the highest possible score in the customer experience criterion and the highest score in the market presence category.

According to the report, “Oracle Cloud HCM proves that long-term strategies and leadership pay off. […] Following more than a decade of sustained development, which included major investments in user experience design and the acquisition of Taleo (2012), Oracle Cloud HCM now provides a comprehensive, sophisticated HCM suite.” The report also notes, “We expect to see Oracle continue to increase the depth of functionality in recruiting, HR service delivery, and digital assistant use cases.”

“We are proud to be recognized as a Leader in the Cloud HCM market,” said Chris Leone, senior vice president, Applications Development, Oracle. “At Oracle, we stand by our commitment to deliver purposeful products, meet evolving customer needs, and lead with innovation. We believe Forrester’s evaluation of our technology validates our position and status in the industry.”

Part of Oracle Cloud Applications, Oracle Cloud HCM helps organizations connect every human resource process from hire to retire—including global HR, talent management, workforce management, and payroll. Oracle provides organizations a complete Cloud HCM solution that improves business agility and empowers organizations to adapt to changing market dynamics.

For additional information on Oracle Cloud HCM visit: https://www.oracle.com/applications/human-capital-management/

Oracle Cloud HCM

As organizations navigate the current environment, HR teams are taking center stage and we couldn’t be prouder to be partnering with them as they help their organizations adapt to unexpected workforce changes and define what’s next.

The critical role HR teams are playing also underlines the importance of them having access to the very best technology and that’s why we are honored to be named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Cloud Human Capital Management Suites, Q2 2020—Check out the press release here.

Of the 11 cloud HCM suite providers recognized, Oracle Cloud HCM was one of only four vendors in the Leaders category and received the highest score in the current offering category. We are also especially proud to have received the highest possible score in the customer experience criterion, which we believe speaks to our investment in a customer-first mindset and underpins everything that we do and deliver for our customers.

According to the Forrester report, “Cloud HCM suite vendors are attempting to do more than ever. In addition to supporting and fulfilling workforce operations and the employment contract (i.e., payroll and workforce management), they aim to aid the organization’s business and workforce strategy with tools that help attract, develop, and retain talent. […] The outbreak of COVID-19 created a global health pandemic with massive economic fallout this year. It also delivered a stark reminder of the importance of HCM capabilities serving multiple constituents in an organization as HR pros, CIOs, and business leaders worked to ensure immediate workforce safety, resilience, and business recovery.”

I couldn’t agree more. In the face of a crisis, HR and business leaders rely on technology to make quick, efficient, and informed decisions to keep the workforce operating—while maintaining business continuity and resilience. Our HCM suite has proven to do just that and I am beyond proud of my team who are continuing to focus on building next generation capabilities and ensuring customer success in these challenging times.

Oracle Cloud HCM is designed to humanize employee experiences, support virtually any HR need, and empower organizations to adapt to changing market dynamics. We’re happy to see that The Forrester Wave Report’s evaluation of Oracle includes our more recent investments and some of the features we are most proud of, such as HR Help Desk and digital assistant, which are especially needed to help HR teams navigate the uncertainty of today’s environment.

In evaluating our HCM suite, the Forrester report notes, “Oracle Cloud HCM proves that long-term strategies and leadership pay off.” I believe our commitment to deliver purposeful products, meet evolving customer needs, and lead with innovation is indeed moving the needle. Here are some of the key takeaways from our evaluation, according to the Forrester report:”

• “Following more than a decade of sustained development, which included major investments in user experience design and the acquisition of Taleo (2012), Oracle Cloud HCM now provides a comprehensive, sophisticated HCM suite.”

• “We expect to see Oracle continue to increase the depth of functionality in recruiting, HR service delivery, and digital assistant use cases.”

• “Oracle Cloud HCM is a good option for larger, multinational organizations (more than 5,000 employees) with more sophisticated HCM needs…”

The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Human Capital Management Suites, Q2 2020 is an assessment of the top vendors in the market, and shows how each provider measures up and helps CIOs and chief HR officers (CHROs) select the right one for their needs. To learn more about the report, click here.

Uber Freight

The last few months have shown the value that dynamic logistics operations can bring as organizations respond to industry, market, and route changes to meet customer needs and deliver on brand promises.

We’re working to further increase flexibility and control for shippers around the world by partnering with Uber Freight, a logistics platform with one of the world’s largest digitally-enabled carrier networks, to help customers increase efficiency and flexibility of operations so they can move their goods with speed and confidence.

By directly integrating Uber Freight with Oracle Transportation Management Cloud, shippers can now take advantage of real-time pricing and tendering capabilities as well as instant and reliable capacity, 24/7. Real-time pricing enables shippers to seamlessly plan for and manage their day-to-day operations, in addition to navigating fluctuating demands such as seasonal overflow, exception management, new lanes, and over-capacity. For example, a large American multinational consumer products company now manages 30 percent of its freight through the Uber Freight API integration into the Oracle Transportation Management Cloud, and has been able to reduce total transportation costs by 5 percent.

“Today’s market is in constant flux and shippers need real-time visibility into the market in order to make critical decisions about their operations,” said Laurent Hautefeuille, head of business development at Uber Freight. “We’re thrilled to have Oracle as an innovation partner. By working closely with Oracle, we will enable our shipper partners to manage changing capacity demands while maximizing efficiency. Together, we’re creating a seamless freight marketplace with end-to-end visibility.” 

About Uber Freight

Uber Freight is a logistics platform built on the power of Uber with the goal to reshape global logistics and deliver reliability, flexibility and transparency for shippers and carriers. Since launching in 2017, Uber Freight has built one of the world’s largest digitally-enabled carrier networks and transformed entrenched practices around pricing and booking freight to reduce inefficiencies and increase opportunities for business growth and industry collaboration. Today, the business counts over 50,000 carriers in its network and thousands of shippers as customers, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, including AB InBev, Nestle, LG, Land O’Lakes and many more.

No one knows what a post COVID-19 world will look like and no two industries or geographies are experiencing the same reality, but the one certainty is that every organization needs to balance urgent and critical short-term needs with long-term strategic priorities.

In this environment, scenario planning and strategic modeling have become essential to finance teams as they assess a wide array of possible outcomes, forecast revenues and liquidity, and make iterative short- and medium-term forecasts. And that’s why we’re providing free access to Oracle Financial Statement Planning, including Strategic Modeling, to all existing Oracle Planning Cloud customers for the next 12 months*.

Oracle Financial Statement Planning will help our customers run detailed ‘what-if’ scenarios for a wide array of possible economic situations, including payment delays, inventory fluctuations, and supply disruptions. It will also help increase the accuracy of revenue and cash flow forecasting and capital structure scenario modeling, and assist with bank covenant compliance, funding compliance, and credit rating calculations.

With free access to these industry-leading capabilities, you will be able to benefit from:

• Enhanced business agility and improved decision-making: Our Monte Carlo simulation capabilities will help you substantially improve business agility and mitigate negative outcomes by enabling you to test a range of likely outcomes and plan for potential responses.
• Accurate liquidity models: Balance sheet modeling becomes critical when you are modeling for liquidity. Our built-in “goal-seek” capability will help you run periodic checks to decide which operational variables need to change for effective cost management and cash optimization.
• Simple and insightful reporting and analytics: It is key to not only communicate the numbers in the model, but also the thinking behind the numbers. Real-time analysis and report distribution are available using a variety of report formats, and both reporting and analysis are possible using a web browser and SmartView for Microsoft Office.

What does scenario planning look like in action?

To paint the picture of scenario planning in action, consider retailers—whose industry has seen significant disruption to in-store traffic. Many retailers now have to factor in phased reopening of physical locations in addition to anticipating continued shifts in the mix of online vs in-store revenues. They also need to consider consumer spending shifts, with staple items driving a larger percentage of revenues than luxury items.

This is just one example. We know that every single industry will be impacted in a different way, which is why we’re also providing additional educational resources to help finance teams. We’ve made online tutorials and a step-by-step guide available so you can easily configure and take advantage of these free capabilities.

Additionally, several of our partners are here to assist in implementing these new modules, including Accenture, Alithya, Baker Tilly, Deloitte, EPMI, Grant Thornton, Hackett, Huron, IBM, Inlumi, InterRel, KPMG, Oracle Consulting, Peloton, Perficient, Performance Architects, PwC, Qubix, SC&H Group and Strategy Lighthouse.

No one has a crystal ball, but regardless of what happens in the coming months, we are committed to helping our customers. For CFOs and finance leaders across the globe, the next few months will represent their biggest professional challenge. We’re here to support you and we’ll get through this together!

Stay safe,
Hari

Other resources

Customers can download a white paper on Scenario Modeling here.

Industry webinars on scenario planning in a crisis

• COVID-19 | Scenario Planning & Strategic Modeling (AICPA)
• COVID-19 | Business Planning and Impacts (AICPA)
• Using Strategic Modeling and Connected Planning to Navigate Market Uncertainty (Financial Executives International)

* Offer available to Oracle Planning Cloud customers from May 13, 2020 until April 30, 2021

Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM. Built on Oracle Analytics Cloud and powered by Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM provides HR executives, analysts, and line-of-business leaders with deeper insights into workforce management by enabling a comprehensive view into data from across the organization. The new self-service analytics capabilities help customers maximize the value of Oracle Cloud HCM.

“In today’s volatile business environment, HR has become a key strategic business partner for the organization,” said T.K. Anand, senior vice president, Oracle Analytics. “With Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM, customers are now able to leverage out-of-the-box HR analytics to gain unprecedented intelligence and reduce the organization’s reliance on IT. This allows for closer collaboration between HR and other key business units—such as finance—to help our customers navigate uncertain times and position them for sustained business growth.” 

Built for HR Decision-Makers and Business Partners

Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM includes the following pre-built features:  

• Cross-functional data model: Accelerates analysis of large volumes of operational data within Oracle Cloud HCM. The data model resides within the high-performing, easy-to-use, and elastically scalable Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, enabling alignment across business functions.
• KPI and dashboard library: Delivers a rich set of more than 50 HR KPIs, dashboards, and reports for key HR metrics including workforce composition, turnover and retention, and team effectiveness to help HR teams gain faster insights. Pre-built KPIs include:
  • Workforce demographics, span of control, and hire and promotion status
  • Turnover (voluntary and involuntary) and retention
  • Diversity statistics and trends
  • Compensation trends and ratios
  • Performance talent ratios
• Advanced analytics: Saves HR teams time, effort, and potential errors in calculations by analyzing key areas including:
  • Top talent retention
  • Turnover by compa-ratio
  • Team effectiveness
  • Span of control
  • Diversity
• Extensibility to fit the business: Enables customers to augment Oracle Cloud HCM data with data from other Oracle applications, non-Oracle applications, or other external data sources.

“Organizations routinely report that utilizing cross-functional data delivers competitive advantage,” said Dave Menninger, SVP, Ventana Research. “Analytics based on a range of data that extends beyond the limits of the department—such as the capabilities in Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM—enable line-of-business personnel to make decisions and take actions for the organization to best meet its strategic and operational objectives.”

“To deliver value, analytics must impact a business process. Analytic applications support business processes directly by delivering a variety of different types of analysis packaged as solutions targeting specific processes, and specific groups of business users. They cover various functions. Some support industry-agnostic business processes such as procurement, which some are industry-specific,” said Gartner analysts Alys Woodward and Gareth Herschel.
*Source: Hype Cycle for Back-Office Analytic Applications, 2019 (30 Sept 2019)

The latest offering in the Oracle Analytics for Fusion Applications suite, Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM offers the same breadth of analytics capabilities added to Oracle Cloud ERP in September 2019. Oracle plans to continue enhancing the full suite of Oracle Fusion Applications with advanced analytics capabilities.

What Customers Are Saying

“We are a people-first company,” said Wendy Cottrell, head of global HR information systems, National Instruments. “Oracle Analytics makes complex analysis easy for executives and HR to help them make informed decisions on a regular basis.”

National Instruments is a Texas-based producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. A design partner and early adopter of Oracle Analytics for Fusion Applications, National Instruments is using Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM for retention analysis and improved team effectiveness.

“The packaged insights and architectural flexibility of Oracle Analytics will quickly enable us to drive strategic initiatives in partnership with the COEs and HRBPs in a data-driven manner,” said Andrew Dennan, head of HR shared services, Synlait Milk Limited.

Synlait Milk Limited is a New Zealand-based 21st century milk nutrition company combining expert farming with state-of-the-art processing. Synlait Milk is using Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM to gain insights on team effectiveness, diversity, and attrition, in addition to integrating survey data with Oracle Cloud HCM data.

What Partners Are Saying

“Clients are searching for analytics solutions that can drive value from existing data across all areas of their business,” said Richard Solari, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and global Oracle analytics and cognitive leader. “Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM can provide intuitive insights that will help organizations make more informed decisions that will drive lasting business value.”

“Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM enables HR professionals to hit the ground running in turning workforce data into meaningful insights,” said Todd Randolph, Principal, Advisory Services, KPMG and US Oracle Analytics Leader. “As a result, our customers’ HR teams are empowered to become highly strategic advisors to the entire business.”

8x8, Inc.

Today Oracle announced that 8x8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform, is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to power its secure Jitsi.org and 8x8 video meeting solutions as it scales to handle explosive growth in users.  8x8 has seen a significant increase in usage across its private and secure video meetings solutions, including Jitsi Meet and 8x8 Video Meetings, exceeding 20 million monthly active users worldwide¹, as video conferencing has become the standard communication tool during this critical time.  8x8 moved its video meetings services from AWS to Oracle for substantial performance enhancements—experiencing more than a 25 percent increase in performance per node on Oracle Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure when compared with the previous cloud provider—global reach, and savings of more than 80 percent in network outbound costs. 

Demand for technology that enables public and private organizations of every size around the world to stay connected has driven explosive growth in video conferencing in recent months in areas such as remote working and customer engagement, distance learning and telehealth. Some organizations relying on Jitsi Meet and 8x8 Video Meetings services during the ongoing pandemic include WeSchool in Italy, Every Child Pediatrics and Retreat Behavioral Health in the US, and Bionical Solutions in the UK.  

To support the rapid change in the way businesses, organizations, health care providers and educators work, the 8x8 video meetings platform needed to hyperscale quickly to support demand. As 8x8 expanded its offerings and global reach, its customers consumed a tremendous amount of network bandwidth and compute, which exceeded 1.5 petabytes a day of egress network traffic and was increasing day by day. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives 8x8 scale, performance, and low network latency and allows it to focus on serving millions of end users. While this performance is critical for its growth, equally important is the significant reduction in cost for compute and network services. Across every essential service to 8x8—compute, network transfer, and storage—Oracle Cloud was significantly less expensive than AWS.

“We’re incredibly proud to help businesses, organizations, educators, and health professionals stay connected during this challenging time. As global demand on our video meetings platform grew exponentially, we needed a partner to scale rapidly and cost effectively with us,” said Vik Verma, CEO, 8x8. “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides industry-leading security, global reach and an unmatched level of support combined with exceptional price and performance that we need now and in the future. The added benefit of a strong go-to-market opportunity on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace was also a key differentiator for this partnership.”

8x8 is a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) and will expand its go-to-market reach with Oracle. 8x8 video meetings solutions are available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, where customers can search for available applications and services to find the best business solutions for their organization.

“As the world redefines the way we communicate, video conferencing has become a critical service and one of our fastest-growing segments,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, development, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure provides the right platform for resource intensive applications like video conferencing and streaming content at a price that removes barriers for 8x8 to accelerate onboarding more end-users. We’re excited to work with 8x8 as it joins the Oracle Cloud Marketplace where our enterprise customers can easily access its video conferencing service.”

Over 20 Million Video Meetings Monthly Active Users Worldwide¹

8x8 is the main contributor to the Jitsi.org open-source secure video meetings technology, and the standalone and integrated versions of 8x8 Video Meetings are powered by Jitsi. The Jitsi.org code has been hardened with over a million downloads and is embedded in applications like banking video conferencing, education-as-a-service platforms, and home security applications globally.

8x8 Video Meetings utilizes the WebRTC standard, which enables attendees to instantly join meetings without any downloads or plugins required. 8x8 Video Meetings is also packaged with 8x8 X Series meeting the needs of businesses with a mobile and remote workforce by providing a highly reliable and resilient solution across desktop and mobile devices for voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, APIs and advanced analytics built on an open cloud technology platform. This allows companies to rapidly unify a distributed workforce and enable flexible workstyles. It is also offered with 8x8 Express, which is for small organizations and teams that require a complete, preconfigured business phone system with a dedicated business number, video meetings and messaging in a single desktop and mobile application.

For the latest 8x8 video meetings solutions usage statistics, user stories and social posts updated daily, visit https://www.8x8.com/live.

¹ A Monthly Active User is defined as a unique user who attended at least one meeting, with at least one other attendee, in the last 30 days.

8x8, Inc.

8x8, an innovator in cloud communications, is helping keep organizations, educators, healthcare professionals and businesses active despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which made working in close quarters untenable. In doing so, 8x8 and its Jitsi subsidiary faced dramatically increased demand for their respective video meeting solutions, which 8x8 met by moving to Oracle Cloud from Amazon Web Services.

Now, with Oracle as its new cloud partner, 8x8, is helping a soaring number of organizations remain operational during these unprecedented times.

Over the past two months, 8x8 saw demand across its private and secure video services, including 8x8 Video Meetings and Jitsi Meet, explode to more than 20 million monthly active users, which meant it was serving 1.5 petabytes of video data out to users daily. Schools, healthcare organizations, and businesses around the world are using the service to maintain activities while allowing employees, customers, patients and students to stay away from offices and classrooms.

That spike in demand put a huge burden of responsibility on 8x8, and it turned to the cloud provider that could scale to those heightened requirements.

Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud helped 8x8 not only meet this dizzying level of demand but also saved it more than 80 percent on the cost of outbound or exported data compared to AWS. The cost of sending data out of a given cloud is a significant factor for business customers, and in the case of a video streaming service, those so-called data egress charges add up fast.

In addition, 8x8 was able to get a 25 percent performance boost per compute-node on Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud infrastructure compared to other providers.

“As video meetings quickly became the connective tissue of today’s new world, we saw our user count soar. To support that exponential growth, we looked at several platforms and chose Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud infrastructure for its strong security, outstanding price/performance, and world-class support to serve this new surge of users,” said Vik Verma, CEO of Campbell, Calif.-based 8x8.

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, product development of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, is happy to welcome 8x8 aboard.

“As the world redefines the way we work and educate people, video conferencing has become a mission-critical service, in a very real sense, and has become one of our fastest growing business segments,” Magouyrk said.

Users of 8x8 video communications solutions include WeSchool in Italy, Every Child Pediatrics and Retreat Behavioral Health in the U.S., as well as Level39, Europe’s largest tech incubator.

8x8 is proud to enable people and businesses around the world stay productive at a challenging time. And Oracle, fielding its modern cloud architecture, is there to help in this critical endeavor.

Optimizing efficiency in clinical trials is paramount for research institutions as they look to deliver needed therapies faster. To achieve this goal, full-service clinical research organization (CRO), Peachtree BioResearch Solutions has selected Oracle Health Sciences cloud services to optimize its clinical startup and management activities.

Peachtree BioResearch Solutions provides global development services for emerging to mid-sized biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies. The company will use Oracle Health Sciences Select Cloud Service, Activate Cloud Service, and Siebel Clinical Trial Management System to quickly plan, set-up, manage, monitor and analyze clinical trials for its mid-sized customers.

Peachtree is deploying the Activate Express configuration, specifically designed to accelerate and streamline the implementation process for mid-sized biotech companies and regional CROs to optimize site selection and activation activities using the most advanced and proven startup workflow engine available.

“Streamlining communication and providing transparency into startup activities with our stakeholders is critical to our process optimization efforts and to speeding the delivery of therapies to patients in need,” said Kristy Nichols, president, CEO and co-founder of Peachtree. “Oracle Health Sciences solutions enhance our clinical business intelligence and management capabilities, allowing us to make timely interventions and course corrections, as well as uncover insights into processes ripe for future enhancements—ultimately leading to timeline reductions and enhanced operational performance.”

Study startup, which includes activities associated with site identification, feasibility assessment, selection, activation, and monitoring, is a notorious bottleneck in clinical trials. Numerous factors can adversely impact study startup, including contract and budget negotiations, regulatory changes and compliance, Institutional Review Board approvals, clinical staff turnover, and others. All of these contribute to significant trial delays and cost overages.

Oracle’s Select Cloud Service and Activate Cloud Service solutions will enable Peachtree to optimize the many study startup steps with workflow automation and real-time insights into study status, which make it easier to ensure quality team performance and enable the discovery of meaningful patterns in study data.

Beyond simple aggregation of site information, Select Cloud Service provides a data-driven approach to aid in the identification of sites and target populations ideally suited to studies. Activate Cloud Service streamlines the startup process of study-specific workflows and enhances real-time oversight for clinical operations management by tracking milestones on the critical path and providing transparent, user-friendly document management capabilities that support regulatory compliance. These insights guide organizations in their optimization efforts, and provide a stark contrast to the manual, time-consuming methods still predominantly used across the industry.

“Peachtree joins other leading mid-sized organizations that leverage our industry leading technology to specifically tackle entrenched bottlenecks in study startup,” said Sujay Jadhav, global vice president, Oracle Health Sciences. “The combination of Select and Activate offer a head-on approach to help Peachtree to achieve operational excellence and strategic objectives with our streamlined solutions.”

Oracle continues to forge the expansion of our cloud interoperability collaboration with Microsoft Azure into Asia with a new cloud interconnect location in Tokyo. This new Tokyo interconnection will enable businesses to share data across applications running in Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. This facility joins interconnect locations already operating in Amsterdam, London, Ashburn, Virginia, and Toronto.

In this effort, Oracle is meeting surging enterprise demand for multi-cloud capabilities worldwide, including in Japan and the broader APAC region. The goal of the overall collaboration, announced in June 2019, is to make it faster and easier for enterprises to move their workloads from internal data centers to the cloud that best suits each application.

For example, a large business may want to run some applications on Azure, which connect to their trusted database solutions, including Oracle Autonomous Database or Exadata, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Or it may want to modernize existing applications by tapping into cloud native services like Azure IOT service or Oracle Digital Assistant.

Many businesses are opting to use multiple clouds and many also use both Microsoft and Oracle technology. The interconnect makes sharing data across Azure and Oracle cloud faster and easier for these customers, as does our joint customer support.

The interconnect fosters cloud migration for mission-critical workloads via a dedicated high-speed connection, and a federated single-sign on for Oracle Cloud and Azure resources, and a collaborative technical support model.

And, we’re not done yet: Oracle plans to introduce additional Interconnect locations based on customer demand, so stay tuned.

We continue to do everything we can to make it possible for our customers and partners to adjust to the unique demands and operational challenges they may be facing.

Over the last few weeks, we have seen hundreds of examples of how our customers, partners, and employees are making an impact during this crisis. We’ll be sharing many more of these over time, but I wanted to give you a quick sample of the many ways in which we have partnered closely with our customers to make a difference during these unprecedented times.

Supporting healthcare organizations and institutions

Healthcare organizations, governments, and researchers are all working together in the fight against COVID-19. We’re supporting our customers as they look to find vaccines and drug therapies, connect patient data and support citizens’ healthcare needs—all with the ultimate goal of saving lives.

For hospitals, managing the flow of people coming into their facilities and clinics for testing is a priority, as is preventing cross-infection once people are onsite. Working with Oracle, Hulunbuir People’s Hospital in inner Mongolia was able to use the Oracle Application Express (APEX) programming tool to build and deploy a laptop-based application in just three days to digitize admission processes and eliminate a paper-based process that risked spreading the virus.

The central Mexican state of Queretaro has, with Oracle’s help, stood up a COVID-19 pre-screening web application to help citizens determine if they should get tested based on their symptoms. The goal is to keep the limited testing facilities available for the most at-risk people. During its first week, the system, which utilizes Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer database, Java, and WebLogic, processed more than 15,500 questionnaires.

Even non-healthcare companies are trying to pitch in. Manufacturers, for example, are doing their part to help meet the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) used by front line healthcare workers. Bedford Industries, which in normal times manufactures plastic twist ties for bread and produce bags, and flexible wires built into medical masks, has nimbly shifted to making the face shields that are in short supply for front line personnel. As word got out, the company was inundated with online orders—not from its traditional customers, but from local fire departments, nursing homes, even grocery stores—all of which now find themselves on the front lines of a pandemic containment effort. The Oracle NetSuite professional services team worked tirelessly to help the company get an online store up and running in a matter of days.

Enabling researchers with technology

Oracle itself has also been actively engaged in the ongoing fight against COVID-19. Our primary goal has been to develop and deploy a series of cloud applications that will gather the data necessary to enable health professionals to answer one critical question: What drugs are effective in treating or preventing the COVID-19 virus? Oracle donated a Therapeutic Learning System to the US government that allows physicians and patients to record the effectiveness of promising COVID-19 drug therapies. This was created in partnership with US agencies such as the NIH, FDA, CDC, CMS, and HHS. By collecting this real-world patient data, we hope to discover which of the drugs are most effective against COVID-19, their optimal dosages, and how early in the disease progression the drugs need to be administered.

In the UK, the University of Bristol is using a combination of supercomputing cycles and Oracle Cloud computing to screen thousands of chemical compounds for potential efficacy against the virus.

And, we’re providing immunology experts at Flinders University, located in Adelaide, South Australia, and Vaxine Pty Ltd, a biotechnology company based at Flinders, with the infrastructure and high performance computing resources needed to model the COVID-19 virus proteins, thereby helping reduce vaccine development timelines from years down to months.

Oracle is also making high performance computing power available to researchers—like the Folding@home Consortium—looking for a cure for COVID-19. Folding@home crowdsources computing power in order to simulate the dynamics of proteins—notably a behavior known as folding – in order to discover how the virus reproduces itself and suppresses immune systems. Oracle’s high performance computing team has been among the top contributors to the consortium. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is also running the job-scheduling server, which manages the queue of computing work across the widely distributed machines used by the project.

The COVID pandemic is having a significant social and economic impact around the world, and will continue having repercussions for years to come. We are committed to standing with our customers to meet the challenges we face now as well as those that lie ahead.

For more information visit: oracle.com/corporate/covid-19.html.  

As a leading provider of data cleansing solutions, Naveego enables organizations to proactively manage, detect and address data accuracy issues across all enterprise data sources in real-time–regardless of structure or schema. To best support their cloud-based, distributed architecture, Naveego chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to advance its goal of becoming the leader in cleansing datasets used to train AI and machine learning applications.

Naveego selected Oracle because they were looking for a trusted, collaborative partnership that would grow alongside their business. The cloud-native enterprise-scale business needed a reliable partner to help them compute and store agnostic data in multiple formats from multiple distributed sources. From the time Naveego selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to full migration was only 30 days, and the company has already realized a 60 percent cost saving compared to their previous AWS solution, driven mainly by lower compute and network charges.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has proven to be 60 percent more cost-effective on compute and they were able to take out the overhead cost of data transfer and Kubernetes-based container services, said Katie Horvath, chief executive officer, Naveego. “With these cost savings, we’ve been able to increase R&D productivity by opening up more environments while staying within budget.”

Providing cloud-native data integration with built-in data quality controls, Naveego collects, manages, and connects data in all formats, driving the consistency and accuracy needed for effective analytics. This uniquely includes cleansing legacy data and reconfiguring it into a functional format.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is purpose-built to handle enterprise workloads quickly and securely,” said Vinay Kumar, vice president, product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Naveego’s data integration and cleansing platform requires a strong partner that delivers cost savings and consistent performance, and at the same time is invested in their long-term success. Oracle is well suited to do both.”

Naveego joined the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, an online store dedicated to marketing cloud business apps and professional services offered by Oracle Cloud partners, to offer data integration, accuracy and cleansing end-to-end services to the Oracle community.

Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud

Oracle’s modern, second-generation cloud is built and optimized specifically to help enterprises run their most demanding workloads securely. With unique architecture and capabilities, Oracle Cloud delivers unmatched security, performance, and cost savings. Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud is the only one built to run autonomous services, including Oracle Autonomous Linux and Oracle Autonomous Database, the industry's first and only self-driving database. Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive cloud computing portfolio, from application development and business analytics to data management, integration, security, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended the way people everywhere work, eat, and socialize. Stay-at-home mandates and suspension of large public gatherings have changed everything.

But Zoom, with Oracle as a new cloud partner, has made it much easier for people to continue taking part in common daily activities—from attending business meetings and school classes to  practicing yoga—and yes, cocktailing—in the face of this threat, where social distancing is key. In some venues, Zoom is even being used to try civil and criminal cases.

In April, Zoom’s daily tally of meeting participants mushroomed to 300 million, up 50% from 200 million the previous month. One reason for that growth spurt was that the company, founded in 2011 with a focus on business users, was scaling up to support educators and students with a free tier of its service.

As the pandemic spread, Zoom also decided to eliminate the 40-minute limit for K-12 schools. All of that meant the San Jose-based company needed to boost its cloud capacity to support the additional flood of videoconferences. And that’s why it got in touch with Oracle, which was quickly on board in this effort.

Oracle’s engineering team worked quickly, deploying Zoom on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and ensuring Zoom had enough cloud capacity to serve the hundreds of thousands of new users flocking to its service. And when that flood turned into millions of additional students, teachers, and others, Zoom was able to easily scale up its capacity further to meet that need.

Helping Zoom meet the soaring demand also demonstrates the robustness and reliability of Oracle’s second-generation cloud, which was built to handle the tough demands of video communications and other broadcasting applications smoothly.

While Zoom’s services were already proven in business settings when COVID-19 hit, it was clear that its easy-to-use video communications could also make life easier for non-business users, including parents now pulling double and triple duty as teachers, coaches, and nurses—all while maintaining their professional lives. Far flung family members can also visit each other using Zoom while following recommended social distancing guidelines.

In the process, the company’s name has morphed into both a noun and a verb. Phrases like “Do you want to Zoom?” have entered the vernacular both in work and social settings. Zoom has even facilitated wakes and weddings.

Given all this, it’s safe to say that Zoom’s high-quality video communications service is helping hundreds of millions of people—many of whom are confined to their homes—feel a little less alone, a little more connected to one another. And, Oracle with its modern Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, is thrilled to help make that happen.