To advance its mission of providing excellent care for life, Centra Health has selected Oracle Cloud Applications. With a complete and integrated suite of applications to manage its finance, procurement, HR and supply chain, Centra Health will be able to increase productivity, improve controls, drive down costs and enhance overall business insights.

Founded in 1987, Centra Health is a regional nonprofit healthcare system with 8,400 staff that serves more than 500,000 people in 70 locations in central and southern Virginia. To continue to deliver on its mission and provide the best possible services for its patients, Centra Health needed to replace its aging and disparate on-premises applications with an integrated suite of applications that would meet its functional needs while driving down costs. After extensive review, Centra selected Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, and Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud to support its vision for improved, affordable healthcare.

“When determining the appropriate vendor to support our business, we used a multidisciplinary process to ensure our needs were accurately quantified and comprehensively vetted,” said Tom Lawton, vice president and chief resource officer at Centra Health. “Oracle surfaced as the ERP vendor that checked all of the boxes, and our leadership felt confident that Oracle could support both our current and future needs. We are also anticipating additional value from the relationship with Oracle by having a common platform across our HR, finance, and supply chain operations.”

With Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud, and Oracle SCM Cloud, Centra Health will be able to take advantage of the cloud to break down organizational silos, standardize processes, and manage data from its finance, supply chain and HR teams on a single integrated cloud platform. In addition, by providing a common user interface across all functional areas, Oracle Cloud Applications will help Centra Health increase employee engagement, collaboration, and performance. To drive better business results and ensure its team stays focused on providing the best possible patient care, Centra Health will also leverage Oracle’s embedded healthcare and technology expertise, best practices, and third-party partnerships.

“Whether its evolving regulations, the shifting payer-provider dynamic, advances in medicine, or increasing customer expectations, hospitals are struggling to stay ahead of accelerating change,” said Rajan Krishnan, group vice president of product development, Oracle. “Oracle Cloud Applications will help Centra Health outpace all of this change and stay ahead of customer expectations by providing proven, best-of-breed applications across every business function.”

With $5.7 billion in global money laundering fines issued in 2019[i], growing threat sophistication, and rising compliance costs, financial institutions need advanced analytics to deter financial crime. To help banks meet this challenge, Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management (FCCM) suite of products now includes an integrated analytics workbench, 300-plus customer risk indicators, and embedded graph analytics visualizations. These capabilities build on Oracle’s more than 20 years of market leadership and innovation to help financial institutions fight money laundering and achieve compliance.

“Financial crimes are increasingly more sophisticated as technology becomes more advanced,” said John Edison, vice president, Financial Crime & Compliance Products, Oracle Financial Services. “Oracle continues to make strategic investments in the area of anti-money laundering and financial crime compliance management to help financial institutions successfully fight these threats. By seamlessly incorporating advanced analytics capabilities into our enterprise-grade platform, financial institutions can quickly overcome adoption impediments and benefit from cutting-edge innovations at scale. This allows their compliance teams to boost their accuracy and efficiency, which is crucial when fighting financial crime and keeping customers safe.”

These new advanced features can help chief compliance officers and data scientists to increase overall program effectiveness, detection accuracy and investigation efficiency through:

• An integrated analytics workbench that allows data scientists to run graph analytics, data visualizations, machine modeling, scenario authoring, and testing on all of their data in one place;
• The ability to augment traditional rules-based behavior detection models with machine-based models and 300-plus out-of-the-box customer risk indicators, which enhance the accuracy of models and reduce false positives;
• Embedded graph analytics visualizations and 30-plus pre-built graph algorithms for advanced case investigations, entity resolution, and discovery of hidden networks. Graph analytics capabilities also support network pattern analysis and deep learning to automate case decisions and provide recommendations to investigators.

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 sciences’ teams to consume data and leverage the advanced analytics to monitor, detect and investigate as needed. With Oracle FCCM, compliance teams can also increase overall program effectiveness, and optimize compliance operations—at scale.

In 2019, Oracle was named a Category Leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant® for:

• AML/Watchlist Monitoring Solutions
• Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services – Data Management
• Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services – Packaged Applications

[i] According to statistics at AMLabc.com

Today during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld London, Oracle Executive Vice President Juan Loaiza announced the latest innovations which further strengthen Oracle’s strategy of providing a single converged database engine able to meet all the needs of a business. The new database features enable customers to take advantage of new technology trends—such as employing blockchain for fraud prevention, leveraging the flexibility of JSON documents, or training and evaluating machine learning algorithms inside the database.

The future is data driven, and effective use of data will increasingly determine a company’s competitiveness. Unlocking the full value of an enterprise’s data requires a new generation of data driven apps. Oracle makes it easy to create modern data driven apps utilizing a single database engine which supports the most suitable data model, process type, and development paradigm for a wide variety of business requirements. We enable our customers to easily run many kinds of workloads against the same data. In contrast, other cloud providers require dozens of different specialized databases to handle different data types. Having to deploy multiple single-purpose databases leads to additional challenges. Having to implement multiple different database engines will increase complexity, risk, and cost because each database introduces its own security model, its own set of procedures for implementing high availability, its own scalability capabilities, and requires separate skillsets to operate.

Much in the way a single smartphone is now a camera, a calendar, a platform for entertainment, and a messaging system, the same idea applies to Oracle’s converged database engine. With Oracle Database, enterprises are no longer forced into purchasing multiple individual single-purpose databases, when all they need is one converged database engine that handles everything.

Today, Oracle is announcing several new features which extend the converged capabilities in Oracle Database. These include: 

• Oracle Machine Learning for Python (OML4Py): Oracle Machine Learning (OML) inside Oracle Database accelerates predictive insights by embedding advanced ML algorithms which can be applied directly to the data. Because the ML algorithms are already collocated with the data, there is no need to move the data out of the database. Data scientists can also use Python to extend the in-database ML algorithms.
• OML4Py AutoML: With OML4Py AutoML, even non-experts can take advantage of machine learning. AutoML will recommend best-fit algorithms, automate feature selection, and tune hyperparameters to significantly improve model accuracy.
• Native Persistent Memory Store: Database data and redo can now be stored in local Persistent Memory (PMEM). SQL can run directly on data stored in the mapped PMEM file system, eliminating IO code path, and reducing the need for large buffer caches. This allows enterprises to accelerate data access across workloads that demand lower latency, including high frequency trading and mobile communication.
• Automatic In-Memory Management: Oracle Database In-Memory optimizes both analytics and mixed workload online transaction processing, delivering optimized performance for transactions while simultaneously supporting real-time analytics, and reporting. Automatic In-Memory Management greatly simplifies the use of In-Memory by automatically evaluating data usage patterns, and determining, without any human intervention, which tables would most benefit from being placed in the In-Memory Column Store.
• Native Blockchain Tables: Oracle makes it easy to use Blockchain technology to help identify and prevent fraud. Oracle native blockchain tables look like standard tables. They allow SQL inserts, and inserted rows are cryptographically chained. Optionally, row data can be signed to ensure identity fraud protection. Oracle blockchain tables are simple to integrate into apps. They are able to participate in transactions and queries with other tables. Additionally, they support very high insert rates compared to a decentralized blockchain because commits do not require consensus.
• JSON Binary Data Type: JSON documents stored in binary format in the Oracle Database enables 4X faster updates, and scanning up to 10X faster.

Oracle’s continuing to lead the industry in delivering the world’s most comprehensive data management solutions, including the industry’s first and only self-driving database, Oracle Autonomous Database. The company was recently named the leader in “The Forrester WaveTM: Translytical Data Platforms, Q4 2019 report which cites that, “unlike other vendors, Oracle uses a dual-format database (row and columns for the same table) to deliver optimal translytical performance,” and that “customers like Oracle’s capability to support many workloads including OLTP, IoT, microservices, multi-model, data science, AI/ML, spatial, graph, and analytics.” 

Explore new Always Free services on Oracle Cloud!

Today, Oracle submitted our response brief before the United States Supreme Court in Oracle v. Google. Over the next few weeks, we will post short blogs regarding our decade-long litigation against Google’s theft of Java software. We will make our legal arguments before the Supreme Court in March. Here, we will try to set the record straight on the facts and policy, which have been wildly distorted by Google and its PR machine led by Google’s head of Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer, Kent Walker.

It is noteworthy that United States Solicitor General Noel Francisco will file a brief and argue at the Supreme Court hearing on Oracle’s behalf. It is also noteworthy that President Obama’s Solicitor General Don Verrilli also filed a brief with the Supreme Court in 2015 on Oracle’s behalf, confirming that strong support for copyright is not a question of political ideology nor is it a particularly controversial part of the law.

There will also be numerous Amicus Briefs filed shortly on the side of strong copyright protection for expressive and creative works including computer software. One brief, filed by the Songwriters Guild will state: “There are untold riches in running the Internet of other people’s things.” Only a songwriter could so eloquently capture the essence of this case, and Google’s business practices. We wish we would have thought of that line ourselves, but we didn’t, so we repeat it here (with credit and permission).

Before we get to the facts of the case, we need to start with what Google actually does for a living, which isn’t always well understood. Google is an advertising company. Period. Sure, it uses technology to facilitate its advertising and data collection, but nearly all of its money—and its nearly $1 Trillion market capitalization—comes from plain old-fashioned advertising. Think Don Draper, not da Vinci. The fact is, the fewer constraints placed on other people’s innovations, creations or content, the more money Google makes. While weak protection for content might be great for Google’s bottom line, it is antithetical to everything we know about how to promote innovation, creativity, and growth in the United States.

In this country, protection of intellectual property is the unassailable driver of our economic prosperity. Confiscatory or overly permissive IP regimes that depend on trying to copy or appropriate others’ innovations inevitably lead to technological stagnation, which helps explain why despite massive state subsidies, China remains a follower in software. As others have said, “strip mining intellectual property is not a road to growth.” And we should be cautious about taking copyright input from a company whose entire business model is based on monetizing other people’s property.

Yet, this is exactly the argument we see with Google’s appeal to the Supreme Court. Google is asking the Supreme Court to recast bedrock and long-standing IP principles for its own narrow self-interest. It casts its appeal as a defense of the innovation economy; it portrays itself as the protector of interoperability; it constantly misrepresents what is meant by software interface (which is fact-bound in this case); and redefines “fair use” to include nearly all commercial copying. It pretends that more than 11,000 lines of software code is something other than “software”. It ignores the fact that Google conceded it killed—not enabled—interoperability in Android. And it actually argues with a straight face that verbatim copying for use in one of the world’s most successful commercial products—Android—was meant to be covered by fair use, meaning the exception now truly eats the rule.

Google then conjures an innovation narrative that attempts to redefine the past decade as one of stagnation and economic decline, when in fact this past decade may be the most innovative on record, defined by advancements in software, networking and interoperability. Cloud, 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum, mobile, autonomy, blockchain have all exploded at precisely the time Google claims this case is killing innovation. Growth in software is at an all-time high. In fact, notwithstanding the arguments of Google and its allies, there is not a scintilla of evidence suggesting that anyone actually believes Oracle v. Google impacts innovation. Oracle v. Google stands for the simple proposition that stealing—no matter the convenience it may offer to the thief—is not acceptable.

Most troubling, Google has spent tens of millions of dollars propagating its view of the world through law schools, think tanks and paid so-called opinion leaders, none of which seem to acknowledge that the advertising elephant driving all of this is sitting right in the room. There is nothing altruistic about Google’s decades-long assault on intellectual property protection. It’s only about Google’s self-interest … and money. And whether it’s authors, musicians, moviemakers, or publishers, Google has used its market power and vast resources to essentially outrun, outlast, and outspend copyright holders.

Until now.

Let’s review the facts as they occurred and not permit Google to engage in historical revisionism to serve its own interests.

1. 1. Google was last to the mobile market, behind Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia, and a number of other start-ups like Danger, which had created the T-Mobile Sidekick. Google understood that search and advertising were moving from desktop to mobile and it needed to be a major player in the mobile market, or it would lose its advertising golden goose.

2. 2. Google could have built a platform from scratch to compete with Windows Mobile, Apple iOS, or Blackberry, as those companies did, but given its late start it didn’t have the time to spend writing a new platform and convincing independent developers to embrace it. So Google turned to Sun Microsystems and Java. Java at the time was revolutionary. It was wildly popular, “open,” and practically the definition of interoperable. It was democratizing computing by enabling developers to “write once, run anywhere.” It was developed by Sun. And, yes, it was protected by copyright and licensed to other companies.

3. 3. Java was made available by Sun under a number of licensing options, including an open source license, a specification license and a commercial license. Developers could of course develop applications using Java with no license at all. Platform and device makers who wanted to run those Java applications licensed Java for their products. A virtual who’s who of technology companies licensed Java under one of those three regimes. Of particular note, Danger, run by Andy Rubin (who was later hired by Google to run Android) had licensed Java for his company’s T-Mobile Sidekick—a popular early smartphone.

4. 4. Google could have taken a license for Java as well, but it had a problem. It wanted to use Java because of its popularity among app developers, but it did not want interoperability and it didn’t want open source. It wanted to turn “write once, run anywhere” into “write once, run only on Android.” Google certainly didn’t want applications written for Android to be easily portable to Windows, Apple, or any potential new entrant to the market.

5. 5. Google evaluated the alternatives to Java and decided they “all suck.” So, it decided to steal Java anyway even if it meant “making enemies along the way.” It went ahead and copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of Java software code and expropriated it for its own clearly commercial use.

6. 6. Google understood exactly what it was doing. In addition to the new head of Google’s Android division, Andy Rubin, who had licensed Java when running Danger, Google’s CEO was Eric Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt was of course the Vice President of Software at Sun during Java’s development.

7. 7. What’s even worse than the harm caused to Sun by stealing Java, Google immediately executed its plan to kill interoperability, also harming millions of developers who counted on Java interoperability to lower the costs of app development.

Google then went straight to the “catch me if you can” chapter of its playbook, assuming that Sun would never stand up to Google’s theft. They were mistaken.

Given Google’s problem with the undisputed facts, during the intervening decade, Google has exercised every bit of its vast resources to attempt to change the law retroactively, to little avail. Since it is not in dispute that Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of code, it attempts to carve this code out of copyright by claiming this particular code is not copyrightable in the first place.

In page after page of policy arguments in its brief, Google asks the Supreme Court to draw some ill-defined line between a made-up category of source code it calls “interfaces” and other source code. Google’s problem is that the Copyright Act makes no such distinction, and policy makers around the world have largely rejected Google’s views and have opted for the status quo, which protects all software code under the Copyright Act. Most policy makers fully understand that Google’s interests are far afield from the interests of actual innovators and creators.

As if Google’s views on copyrightability are not brazen enough, Google then attempts to claim that its theft and clear commercial use of an existing technology already in the market is somehow covered by the fair use doctrine. Such a proposition based on these facts would virtually eliminate copyright altogether because nearly all copying would be “fair”.

Then Google takes us down a road of made up doctrines pulled out of thin air, leaving us with a wall covered in spaghetti. One of the most extraordinary is the concept that the more popular a work is, the less copyright protection it deserves because its free availability would be in the public interest. Seriously? That is closely followed by the bizarre concept that it is standard practice in the industry to freely copy other innovators’ source code. This appears to be the doctrine of “everyone does it.” In fact, what everyone does is safeguard their innovations with intellectual property protections, which most often result in incentives to work cooperatively with mutually beneficial licensing regimes. We then get a dose of the “convenience” principle which, if we even understand their point, goes something like, “we only did it for the convenience of others,” painting itself as something of a Sir Robin of Software. Last, we are told that innovators who are granted constitutional and statutory “monopolies” to their innovations are … wait for it … monopolists. Those living in glass houses shouldn’t throw kettles.

But the most insulting argument Google makes is to paint itself as the standard bearer for openness and interoperability, which is historical revisionism at its finest. Sun, and the thousands of engineers who participated in the development of Java, stood for openness and interoperability. Oracle has maintained that principled stance. Java is among the most important software innovations in history. Google stole it, broke interoperability, baked it into its proprietary, tightly controlled Android operating environment, and has made tens of billions of dollars on the back of Sun’s revolutionary innovation.

Leading us back to where we started: “There are untold riches in running the Internet of other people’s things.”

Next week we will address Google’s Amicus Briefs.

New service makes it quick and easy for data science teams to collaboratively build and deploy powerful machine learning models

New Python support for machine learning algorithms within the Oracle Autonomous Database reduces the need to move data

Seven new services, including new data catalog, to discover, find, organize, enrich and create data assets; new big data service delivers a full Cloudera Hadoop implementation; new service provides SQL access to HDFS; new fully managed service to run Apache Spark applications

Oracle today announced the availability of the Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform. At the core is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, helping enterprises to collaboratively build, train, manage and deploy machine learning models to increase the success of data science projects. Unlike other data science products that focus on individual data scientists, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science helps improve the effectiveness of data science teams with capabilities like shared projects, model catalogs, team security policies, reproducibility and auditability. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science automatically selects the most optimal training datasets through AutoML algorithm selection and tuning, model evaluation and model explanation.

Today, organizations realize only a fraction of the enormous transformational potential of data because data science teams don’t have easy access to the right data and tools to build and deploy effective machine learning models. The net result is that models take too long to develop, don’t always meet enterprise requirements for accuracy and robustness and too frequently never make it into production.

“Effective machine learning models are the foundation of successful data science projects, but the volume and variety of data facing enterprises can stall these initiatives before they ever get off the ground,” said Greg Pavlik, senior vice president product development, Oracle Data and AI Services. “With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, we’re improving the productivity of individual data scientists by automating their entire workflow and adding strong team support for collaboration to help ensure that data science projects deliver real value to businesses.”

Designed for Data Science Teams and Scientists

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science includes automated data science workflow, saving time and reducing errors with the following capabilities:

• AutoML automated algorithm selection and tuning automates the process of running tests against multiple algorithms and hyperparameter configurations. It checks results for accuracy and confirms that the optimal model and configuration is selected for use. This saves significant time for data scientists and, more importantly, is designed to allow every data scientist to achieve the same results as the most experienced practitioners.
• Automated predictive feature selection simplifies feature engineering by automatically identifying key predictive features from larger datasets.
• Model evaluation generates a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics and suitable visualizations to measure model performance against new data and can rank models over time to enable optimal behavior in production. Model evaluation goes beyond raw performance to take into account expected baseline behavior and uses a cost model so that the different impacts of false positives and false negatives can be fully incorporated.
• Model explanation: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science provides automated explanation of the relative weighting and importance of the factors that go into generating a prediction. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science offers the first commercial implementation of model-agnostic explanation. With a fraud detection model, for example, a data scientist can explain which factors are the biggest drivers of fraud so the business can modify processes or implement safeguards.

Getting effective machine learning models successfully into production needs more than just dedicated individuals. It requires teams of data scientists working together collaboratively. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science delivers powerful team capabilities including:

• Shared projects help users organize, enable version control and reliably share a team’s work including data and notebook sessions.
• Model catalogs enable team members to reliably share already-built models and the artifacts necessary to modify and deploy them.
• Team-based security policies allow users to control access to models, code and data, which are fully integrated with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management.
• Reproducibility and auditability functionalities enable the enterprise to keep track of all relevant assets, so that all models can be reproduced and audited, even if team members leave.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, organizations can accelerate successful model deployment and produce enterprise-grade results and performance for predictive analytics to drive positive business outcomes.

Comprehensive Data and Machine Learning Services

The Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform includes seven new services that deliver a comprehensive end-to-end experience designed to accelerate and improve data science results:

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science: Enables users to build, train and manage new machine learning models on Oracle Clou using Python and other open-source tools and libraries including TensorFlow, Keras and Jupyter.
• Powerful New Machine Learning Capabilities in Oracle Autonomous Database: Machine learning algorithms are tightly integrated in Oracle Autonomous Database with new support for Python and automated machine learning. Upcoming integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science will enable data scientists to develop models using both open source and scalable in-database algorithms. Uniquely, bringing algorithms to the data in Oracle Database speeds time to results by reducing data preparation and movement.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalog: Allows users to discover, find, organize, enrich and trace data assets on Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalog has a built-in business glossary making it easy to curate and discover the right, trusted data.
• Oracle Big Data Service: Offers a full Cloudera Hadoop implementation, with dramatically simpler management than other Hadoop offerings, including just one click to make a cluster highly available and to implement security. Oracle Big Data Service also includes machine learning for Spark allowing organizations to run Spark machine learning in memory with one product and with minimal data movement.
• Oracle Cloud SQL: Enables SQL queries on data in HDFS, Hive, Kafka, NoSQL and Object Storage. Only CloudSQL enables any user, application or analytics tool that can talk to Oracle databases to transparently work with data in other data stores, with the benefit of push-down, scale-out processing to minimize data movement.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Flow: A fully-managed Big Data service that allows users to run Apache Spark applications with no infrastructure to deploy or manage. It enables enterprises to deliver Big Data and AI applications faster. Unlike competing Hadoop and Spark services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Flow includes a single window to track all Spark jobs making it simple to identify expensive tasks or troubleshoot problems.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Machines for Data Science: Preconfigured GPU-based environments with common IDEs, notebooks and frameworks that can be up and running in under 15 minutes, for $30 a day.

What Customers Are Saying

AgroScout is dedicated to detecting early stage crop diseases to improve crop yields, reduce pesticide use and increase profits. “Our vision is to make modern agronomy economically accessible to the 1 billion farmers working on 500 million farms worldwide, constituting 30 percent of the global workforce. We plan to achieve this by offering cloud based, AI-driven sustainable agronomy, relying purely on input from low cost drones, mobile phones and manual inputs by growers,” said Simcha Shore, Founder and CEO AgroScout. “Success of this vision relies on the ability to manage a continuous and increasing flow of input data and our own AI-based solution to transform that data into precision and decision agriculture, at scale. Speed, scale and agility of Oracle Cloud has helped us realize our dream. Now, new horizons have opened up with the recent addition of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science that improves our data scientists’ ability to collaboratively build, train and deploy machine learning models. This addition has reduced costs, increased efficiency and has helped us increase our global footprint faster.”

IDenTV provides advanced video analytics based on AI capabilities powered by computer vision, automated speech recognition and textual semantic classifiers. “With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, we are able to scale our data science efforts to deliver business value faster than ever before. Our data science teams can now seamlessly access data without worrying about the complexities of data locations or access mechanisms. While using open-source capabilities like TensorFlow, Keras, and Jupyter notebooks embedded within the environment, we can streamline our model training and deployment tasks resulting in tremendous cost savings and faster results,” said Amro Shihadah, Founder and COO, IDenTV. “We feel that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science in conjunction with benefits of Autonomous Database will give us the edge we need to be competitive and unique in the market.”

This week, Oracle and Microsoft are extending their cloud partnership with a new cloud interconnect location in Amsterdam. This is good news for the many local businesses that rely on software from both companies. The new Amsterdam interconnect will enable these businesses to share data across applications running in Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

The facility in Amsterdam—a strategic data center hub for Europe—joins interconnected regions already up and running in Toronto; Ashburn, Virginia; and London, and is part of a broader Oracle-Microsoft cloud interoperability partnership announced last year.

The goal of the overall collaboration is to make it faster and easier for enterprises to move their on premise workloads to the cloud that best suits the specific needs of an application. For example, an enterprise customer may want to run a Windows-based applications on Microsoft Azure connected to Oracle’s Autonomous Database or Exadata on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Or they may want related Microsoft-centric and Oracle-centric apps to communicate in the cloud in a low latency way.

MESTEC is using Oracle Cloud—Microsoft Azure to deliver solutions to its customers that enable them to dramatically improve their manufacturing performance.

“MESTEC’s leading smart factory solution is powered by high performance cloud infrastructure and database systems. We put Azure and Oracle Cloud to the test by implementing our application tier in Azure connected to Oracle Autonomous Database, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and the results have been extremely positive,” said Mark Carleton, COO, MESTEC. “We are projecting a 50 percent reduction in infrastructure and management cost and up to 500 percent increase in performance. By connecting Oracle and Azure, we’re able to rapidly introduce innovative technologies into our solution, ultimately resulting in a better, smarter solution for our customers enabling them to make dramatic improvements in manufacturing performance.”

This partnership and the resulting interconnected cloud is important for businesses that want to put more of their data and workloads into the cloud but prefer to use cloud providers attuned to their mission-critical data and applications. In addition to offering a high degree of choice and flexibility, Oracle and Microsoft offer integrated identity and access management so customers don’t have to manage multiple passwords when accessing their cloud resources and applications. The collaborative support model and global partner ecosystem add to the enterprise-class experience.

In a recent study, global systems integrator Accenture found that customers using the interconnect can expect performance to meet the demands of latency-sensitive applications. Accenture’s tests found dramatically reduced latency, the average round-trip latency was 1.5 milliseconds.

Amsterdam is not the end of the story. Oracle and Microsoft plan to interconnect additional cloud regions on the U.S. West Coast, Asia, and regions dedicated to U.S. public sector customers.

Several of Africa’s innovative digital-first banks are turning to Oracle Financial Services to transform their processes and deliver a centralized experience for customers. Banks across the continent are investing in the FLEXCUBE Universal Banking platform, which powers more than 10 percent of the world’s consumer bank accounts. Among these is LAPO Microfinance Bank, Nigeria’s largest microfinance bank with four million customers, which is implementing FLEXCUBE as well as Oracle Banking Digital Experience (OBDX) and Oracle Banking Payments (OBP).

The Central Bank of Libya in Tripoli, which includes four of Libya’s public sector banks, is also upgrading its current FLEXCUBE solution. FLEXCUBE helps banks meet customers’ evolving expectations for more digital, responsive and connected experiences. In addition to addressing core-banking needs, the integrated solution will empower banking staff with key insights and help improve operations. It will also make it simpler to launch new products and reduce time-to-market for new services. Other key banks implementing FLEXCUBE include a public sector bank in Algeria, and several others in Malawi, Djibouti, and Sudan.

“We have a long-standing presence in the African market, and it is promising to see more banks streamline their business operations and enhance the customer experience using Oracle,” said Sonny Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Financial Services. “Africa continues to be at the forefront of innovative inclusive banking, and we are poised to support our banking customers as they continue to modernise and expand their digital offerings.”

Oracle’s growth in the continent can also be attributed to the success of other products.  Oracle Banking Digital Experience (OBDX) has been chosen alongside FLEXCUBE by multiple banks including Al Nile Bank and Balad Bank in Sudan, as well as Libya’s Alyaqeen and Andalus Banks, and a postal bank in Senegal. With OBDX, banks can build on their existing infrastructure to launch new digital brands, automate processes, modernize experiences or launch innovative new digital capabilities, such as mobile payments and digital wallets. Meanwhile, Titan Trust Bank in Nigeria is implementing a full suite of solutions: FLEXCUBE, OBDX, OBP and Oracle Banking Corporate Lending.

A history serving African banks

Oracle has been powering banks in Africa for more than 20 years, with 100+ banks in Africa relying on FLEXCUBE to power their growth. Oracle has been consistently investing in the product to ensure that it has anticipated the emerging needs of banks in Africa. It has a vast presence in the region including resources across sales, sales consulting, implementation and support staff, and it is backed by a strong network of established partners.

HBF, Western Australia’s largest private health insurer, has chosen Oracle Health Insurance (OHI) to support its digital transformation. The move is part of a wider technology investment by the company to modernise its systems and processes as it pushes to deliver the very best experiences to its members, employees and providers, and become one of the country’s largest health insurance companies.

HBF currently has more than one million members and a strong reputation in Western Australia for its excellent customer service and support. With Oracle Health Insurance as the core platform across its health insurance products, HBF has the ability to grow its membership and expand its services throughout Australia.

“As the provider of our core health insurance system, Oracle will be a crucially important partner for HBF, enabling us to develop and launch products more quickly in response to our members’ needs,” said Head of Transformation Prasad Arav, HBF Health Limited.

With the highly configurable, API-enabled Oracle Health Insurance software, HBF will be equipped to adapt to changing market demands, member needs and generally improve operational efficiency. HBF chose Oracle Health Insurance in part due to its global relevance—it is successfully used across Europe, the U.S., South America and the Middle East as well as in other Australian companies.

“HBF is a key player in the Australian market and they have chosen Oracle to help them expand their services and business,” said Venky Srinivasan, group vice president, Sales, APJ & Middle East, Oracle Financial Services. “HBF understands that agility and efficient operations are intrinsically linked to growth—especially in the insurance industry where constant market changes make reacting at speed essential. Oracle Health Insurance provides HBF the foundation to expand and will help position it as a leader nationwide.”

We’re thrilled to announce that Gartner named Oracle a Visionary in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Along with our customers and partners, we’ve diligently worked to make Oracle Analytics Cloud the best analytics solution it can be. Our vision is crystal clear, and we’re excited to be named a Visionary. But we all know that we must continue to provide value for our customers and partners every day for them to thrive and grow.

Our Vision

Since Oracle Analytics Cloud's inception, we've believed the next big wave of innovation and business success will be driven by three factors:

• 1. Augmented analytics empowering more people with better insights. Machine learning and AI embedded in the customer experience direct decision makers to the "Why?" not just the "What?" connecting the dots across a broad spectrum of data.
   
• 2. Better insights leading to decisive action. Once you’re armed with facts—especially in the context of your roles and responsibilities, you need to take action to close the loop, make adjustments, and improve performance. Having those insights driven directly from the business applications and key performance indicators (KPIs) that anticipate where you're headed means actions are taken with pin-point accuracy. And all supported by a full enterprise Oracle Cloud stack—from infrastructure to data to analytics to business applications.
   
• 3. Natural language and conversational analytics becoming the norm, not the exception. Use spoken or written language (not just English, but 28 languages) to ask questions of the data—"Show me sales pipeline by product family and region for the second quarter of 2020." Let the system generate relevant analytic content on the fly. Interact in the form factor that makes the most sense for you—on your mobile device, through a digital assistant, on the web. You access the information you need without having to enter the business intelligence (BI) application if you choose not to.

With these as our guiding principles, our work continues on the path to market leadership for augmented, action-oriented analytics.

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It Takes a Community to Excel

We could not have achieved our Magic Quadrant recognition without a vibrant ever-expanding Oracle Analytics Cloud community—our dedicated customers and partners—who have validated our strategy, wisely suggested areas of change and improvement, and been our constant guides as we continue to enhance and improve the Oracle Analytics Cloud customer experience. We thank all of you for being an ongoing presence and true partners in this journey. Our customers often speak on our behalf. Gartner Peer Insights is just one of many forums that let customers review our software:

• A technology innovation leader sees the value of different modes of analytics available from Oracle in one product:
  
  "Best of Both Worlds: Governed Analytics with Power of Self Service." General Manager Technology, Transportation:
  
  https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/analytics-business-intelligence-platforms/vendor/oracle/product/oracle-analytics-cloud/review/view/1027787
• A data and analytics leader considers analytics as a vehicle to grow the business:
  
  "Over the last year, revenues have continued to increase since exposing Account Executives to their daily sales in Oracle Analytics Cloud." Manager, Business Intelligence, Media:
  
  https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/analytics-business-intelligence-platforms/vendor/oracle/product/oracle-analytics-cloud/review/view/1097828
• A research and development leader recognizes the power of augmented analytics:
  
  "Oracle Analytics Cloud is the best self-service analytics cloud where it provides wonderful graphs using AI and ML… Overall the analytical tool provides quick insights in a short span of time." R&D Manager, Retail:
  
  https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/analytics-business-intelligence-platforms/vendor/oracle/product/oracle-analytics-cloud/review/view/1193801

The Journey Ahead: Onward and Upward

We invite all of you to be active participants in the Oracle Analytics Cloud community! Your input is key to our future. Superior vision leads to execution; solid execution leads to success for all of us. We’re honored with our Visionary placement. Now, let’s continue the journey together. As a beloved teacher of mine would say after each milestone was achieved, "Onward and upward to the next plateau—the journey always continues." 

Let me know your thoughts, and read the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms now.

To learn how you can benefit from Oracle Analytics, visit Oracle.com/analytics.

Follow us on Twitter: @OracleAnalytics.

Gartner 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, James Richardson, Rita Sallam, Kurt Schlegel, Austin Kronz, Julian Sun, February 2020

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation.

Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

UK Digital Retailer N Brown Group Plc is migrating to the cloud and extending its partnership with Oracle. With a focus on customer-centricity, the company delivers an extensive range of clothing, footwear, and homewares through its JD Williams, Simply Be, Ambrose Wilson, and Jacamo brands. By embracing Oracle Cloud, N Brown Group can focus on delivering profitable digital growth whilst making their customers look and feel amazing. 

“We want our merchandising teams to focus on creating fashion that fits, flatters, and meets the needs of our diverse customer base. Our digital transformation will create further efficiencies in the business by adopting industry best practices and automating processes that will allow our teams to focus on our core goal—serving customers,” said Adam Warne, chief information officer, N Brown Group Plc. “We chose Oracle Retail to adopt the latest cloud technology, delivered on a platform that can grow with our business needs.”

In partnership with Oracle Retail Consulting Services, N Brown will implement Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting Cloud Service to maximize forecast accuracy for the entire product lifecycle with next-generation retail science. The retailer will capitalize on this functionality to enhance business efficiency. Last year, N Brown also selected Oracle ERP Cloud to offer finance teams faster access to data, delivering an improvement to operational performance.

“Cloud is about continuously delivering innovation that supports retailers with the functionality and the agility required to keep pace with the speed of their business. Our modern platform strategy focuses on delivering insights and informing decisions while executing simultaneously to deliver true business value,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail.

Learn more about N Brown’s story at: https://bit.ly/2vqqLHa

Harper College, one of the largest community colleges in Illinois and winner of the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Award for Best Practices in Community College Budgeting, has selected Oracle Cloud Applications to help support its mission to enrich its diverse communities by providing quality, affordable, and accessible education. With Oracle Cloud, Harper College will be able to better serve the needs of its higher education students by taking advantage of a complete and integrated suite of applications to break down silos; quickly and easily embrace the latest innovations; and improve user engagement, collaboration, and performance.

Opened in 1967 and named after Dr. William Rainey Harper, a pioneer in the country’s community college movement, Harper College is one of the nation’s premier community colleges. Supporting the learning goals of about 35,000 students annually, Harper College needed to increase the efficiency of its core business processes. Turning to the cloud to meet this objective, Harper College will be implementing Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud.

Backed by a referendum affirmed by the community in which it serves, Harper College began to execute on its community driven plan to continue to provide affordable education and to keep its communities and local business competitive in a rapidly changing environment. One priority of the Ensuring a Strong Future plan is to maintain and improve campus infrastructure. The cornerstone of this priority required Harper College to invest in technologies to increase efficiency and support state-of-the-art technologies.

“Since its formation, Harper College has been a pioneer in delivering quality, affordable education,” said Patrick Bauer, CIO of Harper College. “Moving business processes to the cloud with Oracle was a natural evolution and will help to reduce costs while providing an easier path to innovation. Managing finance and HR on the same platform will enhance business processes, improve insights, and increase efficiency to help us continually advance our student services.”

With Oracle Cloud Applications, Harper College will be able to bring HR and finance teams together, create a single source of truth, automate manual processes, and drive end-to-end business innovation. Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle EPM Cloud will enable Harper College to accurately and efficiently process financial information, track project statuses, and identify patterns in operational and financial data. In addition, with Oracle HCM Cloud, Harper College will be able to help faculty and staff provide the highest level of service to students by improving the entire workplace experience for employees, candidates, and HR professionals.

“To respond to rapidly changing educational needs resulting from a decline in overall student enrollment in the U.S. and a decrease in state funding, institutions need real-time visibility across the entire organization,” said Hari Sankar, group vice president, product management, Oracle. “With Oracle Cloud Applications, Harper College will be able to manage its finance and HR processes on a single platform. This will not only help drive efficiencies and improve decision-making, but also help Harper College deliver the best possible experience for its students and staff.”

Oracle ERP Cloud was named the sole Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises[1] and a Leader in the “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises[2].” Oracle EPM Cloud was named a Leader in the “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions[3]” (with the highest position for its ability to execute) and “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions[4].” In addition, Oracle HCM Cloud was recently named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises [5] for its fourth consecutive year and placed the furthest for Completeness of Vision within the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for Midmarket and Large Enterprises [6].

1 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises, Mike Guay, John Van Decker, Christian Hestermann, Nigel Montgomery, Duy Nguyen, Denis Torii, Paul Saunders, Paul Schenck, Tim Faith, 31 October 2018
2 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, John Van Decker, Robert Anderson, Greg Leiter, 13 May 2019
3 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 8 August 2019
4 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 21 October 2019
5 Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises, Melanie Lougee, Ranadip Chandra, Jason Cerrato, Chris Pang, Ron Hanscome, Jeff Freyermuth, Sam Grinter, Helen Poitevin, 23 September 2019
6 Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for Midmarket and Large Enterprises, Melanie Lougee, Ranadip Chandra, Ron Hanscome, Helen Poitevin, Chris Pang, Jeff Freyermuth, Sam Grinter, John Kostoulas, Jason Cerrato, 15 August 2018

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

F&G Annuities & Life (F&G) is using Oracle SD-WAN to boost customer service by reducing network interruptions. F&G’s network relies on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to serve nearly 700,000 customers across the United States. F&G’s VDI includes business critical cloud collaboration, contact center, ERP and customer experience applications.  

In the past, network circuits would drop; forcing employees to log back onto VDI in the middle of customer sessions. Not only did this hurt service resolution times but frustrated employees and hampered productivity.

“Enabling uninterrupted collaboration with our strategic partners and customer service agents is critical to helping our policyholders thrive,” said Jeff Sabin, assistant vice president, IT Infrastructure, Engineering and Operations, F&G. “Oracle’s SD-WAN helps in delivering a resilient network that ensures application availability, reliability and quality of experience, resulting in improved customer service. The best-of-breed SD-WAN technology has lowered our IT costs and freed up our IT team to focus on higher-value activities.”

Oracle SD-WAN delivers a self-driving, self-healing network that helps ensure all types of real-time and cloud based applications work without interruption, even in the case of a link failure or network impairments, such as high jitter, congestion, delay or packet loss. Since working with Oracle, F&G has virtually eliminated network downtime even amid carrier outages.

“Dependable networks are mission critical for our financial services customers to meet rising customer expectations,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications, Networks. “Oracle is committed to delivering trusted enterprise communications solutions that guarantees application availability and quality of experience for those they serve while reducing IT costs.”

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

To help organizations realize the potential of AI-powered applications in sales, marketing, and other business applications, Oracle DataFox has expanded its pool of AI-sourced and managed data. Since being acquired by Oracle in 2018, Oracle DataFox has extended its global coverage by more than 70 percent with rapid growth in Europe, where Oracle DataFox coverage has increased by 135 percent to cover more than one million businesses in the region.

Oracle DataFox is an AI-powered data engine that includes data on millions of organizations worldwide, including most public companies. This includes data on company headcount, funding, revenue, growth signals and awards. To ensure data is up-to-date, Oracle DataFox constantly cleans and enriches the data so that customers can benefit from accurate “smart” data within their applications, which improves the effectiveness of AI and machine learning algorithms. In addition, Oracle DataFox’s pool of company data is constantly being expanded by its AI-driven data engine that continuously extracts detailed data on public and private businesses.

“Good data leads to better recommendations and good business decisions,” said Clive Swan, senior vice president of applications development, Oracle. “The ability to feed AI-powered applications from a larger pool of high-quality and accurate data helps our customers better prioritize sales, marketing and other business activities and drive more revenue growth.”

With native integrations across Oracle’s SaaS offerings, Oracle DataFox sources more than 1 billion data points each year to improve data quality in Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Sales Cloud, as well as other third party customer experience applications. For example, Oracle DataFox helps customers increase fill rates for key sales and marketing data points for company revenue and headcount to 99 percent. Similarly, Oracle DataFox’s real-time signal data (time-based data points) helps organizations understand when their customers and prospects have a higher propensity to buy and enables sales teams to prioritize and assign accounts dynamically.

InnovationQuarter is the regional economic development agency for the Province of Zuid-Holland, also known as the greater Rotterdam—The Hague area. To target and build a strong business network, it needed to look beyond its first party CRM data and gain visibility into other organizations in the region.

“Our mission is to stimulate innovation and economic growth in the greater Rotterdam-The Hague area. To achieve this we needed to have a more complete view of the Dutch business community,” said Chris Van Voorden, Director Foreign Investment & Internationalization at InnovationQuarter, a regional economic development agency in The Netherlands. “Oracle DataFox has significantly improved our efficiency and enabled us to better target and connect with businesses internationally, to drive valuable partnerships.”

Organizations that are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies in finance and operations are growing their annual profits 80 percent faster, according to a new study from Enterprise Strategy Group and Oracle. The global study, Emerging Technologies: The competitive edge for finance and operations, surveyed 700 finance and operations leaders across 13 countries and found that emerging technologies—AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, digital assistants—have passed the adoption tipping point, exceed expectations, and create significant competitive advantage for organizations.

AI and Digital Assistants Improve Accuracy and Efficiency in Finance

Organizations embracing emerging technologies in finance are experiencing benefits far greater than anticipated:

• Errors in finance organizations have been reduced by 37 percent on average.
• 72 percent of organizations using AI have a better understanding of overall business performance.
• 83 percent of executives believe AI will completely automate financial close processes within the next five years.
• Digital assistants increase productivity by 36 percent and accelerate financial analysis by 38 percent.

AI, IoT, and Blockchain Drive More Responsive Supply Chains

AI, IoT, blockchain and digital assistants are helping organizations improve accuracy, speed and insight in operations and the supply chain, and respondents expect additional business value as blockchain applications become mainstream.

• Organizations using AI in their supply chains have seen order fulfillment reduction by an average of 6.7 business days.
• Applying IoT data to supply chain processes helps organizations reduce fulfillment errors by 26 percent on average.
• AI is helping organizations reduce fulfillment errors by 25 percent, stock-outs by 30 percent, and manufacturing downtime by 26 percent.
• Organizations using digital assistants in their supply chains have increased employee productivity by 28 percent and the speed of analysis by 26 percent.
• 87 percent of organizations using blockchain have achieved or exceeded ROI expectations; 82 percent expect to see significant business value within the next year.
• 78 percent of executives believe the ability to verify supply chain monitoring with blockchain will reduce incidents of fraud in their supply chain by 50 percent or more over the next five years.
• 68 percent of respondents see increased business intelligence as a key advantage of emerging technology in supply chain operations.

Emerging Tech Equals Competitive Advantage

The vast majority of organizations have now adopted emerging technologies and early adopters (those using three or more solutions) are seeing the greatest benefit and are more likely to outperform competitors.

• Emerging technologies have become mainstream and 84 percent of organizations are using at least one of these technologies (AI, IoT, blockchain, digital assistants) in production.
• 82 percent of organizations using three or more emerging technologies are ahead of competitors, compared to only 45 percent of organizations using none.
• Organizations using multiple emerging technologies are 9.5 times more likely to have market-leading financial and operational accuracy.
• Organizations are 2-3 times more likely to purchase prebuilt emerging technology solutions than build them on their own (percentage varies depending on technology solution).
• Almost all respondents (91 percent) considered SaaS applications to be a key enabler of emerging technology.

Supporting quotes

“AI, IoT, blockchain and digital assistant capabilities enable organizations to innovate faster, creating significant competitive advantage and driving increased profit for companies embracing those technologies more decisively than their competitors,” said Juergen Lindner, senior vice president, SaaS product marketing, Oracle. “The research finds that these technologies have become mainstream and organizations that sit on the sidelines risk their business relevance. To help our customers outpace change and consequently the competition, we continuously infuse emerging technologies directly into the business processes to ensure they can harness these business-changing technologies.”

“This study makes it clear that emerging technologies have passed the trial phase and are moving toward a state of widespread adoption,” said John McKnight, EVP of Research and Analyst Services of Enterprise Strategy Group. “The business case for these technologies in areas such as finance and operations is maturing at a rapid pace—and in most cases benefits exceed expectations. Furthermore, the research shows that emerging technologies complement and amplify the benefits of one another, which underscores the importance of taking a holistic approach.”

Download a free copy of the summary report here, and the full report here.

Additional Resources

• Oracle Cloud
• Oracle ERP Cloud
• Oracle EPM Cloud
• Oracle SCM Cloud
• Oracle Emerging Technologies

Methodology

Research findings are based on a global survey of 700 finance and operations managers and executives conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group between September 19 to October 16, 2019. The study was administered online and fielded in 13 countries. All respondents were managers and executives in the finance or operations functional units of their organizations, and were required to be frequent users of ERP, EPM or SCM applications. Additionally, only respondents working at organizations with 1,000 or more employees or with annual revenues of $100M of more were considered qualified. The survey was complemented by 10 in-depth interviews with finance and operations leaders from various industries. All respondents were provided an incentive to complete the survey in the form of cash awards and/or cash equivalents.

To help power one of the most dynamic data center and global interconnection platforms in the world, Equinix relies on Oracle Exadata Database Machine as a core Oracle Database transaction engine to run its growing business. With a global footprint of more than 200 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers spanning across more than 50 markets on five continents, Platform Equinix® contains the highest share of the world's public cloud on-ramps and one of the most physically and virtually interconnected ecosystems in the world.

Equinix currently serves nearly 10,000 customers globally, including the world’s largest cloud providers, Fortune 500 enterprises and Global 2000 companies. Equinix has experienced between an estimated 3X and 10X performance improvement for transaction processing and data warehousing analytics, respectively, since implementing Oracle Exadata to support its quote-to-cash business support systems running on Oracle Database and Oracle Applications. With Oracle Exadata, thousands of Equinix users around the world now access their business support systems with ultra-low IO latencies.

Prior to selecting Oracle Exadata, Equinix had implemented a do-it-yourself infrastructure environment comprised of Oracle Database with servers combined with storage and networking products from multiple vendors. With Oracle Exadata, Equinix is achieving up to 24X in estimated greater performance for complex database queries, 4X faster analytics, and 3X faster data replication.

By moving to Oracle Exadata, Equinix is able to run its applications an estimated 30 to 40 percent faster with some workloads showing more than 100 percent improvement. Equinix also eliminated an estimated 12 hours of service downtime for database server patching per year and further reduced application patching downtime by 90 percent.

“Our investment in Oracle Exadata has proven valuable and has exceeded our expectations,” said Milind Wagle, executive vice president and global chief information officer, Equinix. “Not only is Oracle a strategic alliance partner with Equinix, we also consider it an important solution provider trusted to run our mission-critical applications around the world.”

“It’s a strong validation of our strategy to see Equinix, one of the world’s largest providers of interconnected data centers, relying on Oracle Exadata to ensure its customers benefit from superior cloud and infrastructure performance on a 24/7 basis, no matter where they are in the world,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle. “Oracle Exadata powers the Oracle Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service, and Gen 2 Exadata Cloud at Customer, and is the premiere platform for running Oracle Database workloads in the cloud and on-premises.”

In addition to experiencing a reduction in patching requirements, Equinix has also benefitted from net incremental capabilities as a result of Oracle co-engineering, including Automatic Indexing, AI-based Cloud-Scale Performance Management and Hybrid Columnar Compression.

Equinix is implementing Oracle Exadata in a cloud-adjacent architecture environment. This interconnection architecture enables its global user base to access various applications across multiple cloud providers utilizing the exceptional performance of Oracle Database deployed on Exadata systems located in Equinix IBX data center locations and interconnected via Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™).

Oracle and Equinix Global Collaboration

Equinix continues their collaboration as a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) with Oracle Cloud services spanning PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, offering Equinix IBX data centers worldwide. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect is also available at Equinix, providing them with high-performance, private access to Oracle Cloud. Joint enterprise customers can also leverage Equinix Network Edge Services to migrate Oracle applications and databases quickly and cost-effectively from legacy cloud providers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Numbed by yet another year of data breaches–2,013 in 2019 alone by one estimate–it is no surprise researchers widely acknowledge human error as a top-source of cyber insecurity. C-Suite executives and policy makers called “human error” their top cybersecurity risk in Oracle’s Security in the Age of AI report, released last May.

Without change, the scale and frequency of data breaches will continue to increase. To reverse the trend we must better understand how exactly, people contribute to cyber-insecurity.

How human error creates problems

In December 2019, Oracle surveyed 300 enterprise-level IT decision makers nationwide to examine concerns around cybersecurity posture and potential solutions. The survey evaluated the state of cybersecurity preparedness and trust in employing AI to address security gaps at organizations with 500+ employees. We saw key red flags from patching protocols to workforce constraints that created a cycle of vulnerability and error.

The results demonstrate that the human contribution to IT vulnerability remains undeniable. Most respondents (58%) cited human error as a leading reason for IT vulnerabilities. Yet what is  often characterized as a “technical” factor–insufficient patching–was judged just as important as human error, with 57% of those surveyed citing it as a leading reason for vulnerability. But insufficient patching–meaning either that patches are not applied frequently enough, or they are not applied consistently enough–is a factor firmly rooted in human behavior.

The problem of human error may be even bigger than these statistics suggest. Digging deeper, the survey found that nearly half (49%) of respondents cited available workforce as a constraint on patching; 62% said they would apply a wider variety of patches more frequently if they had additional personnel to do so. When asked about major contributors to failed patches, 84% of respondents pointed to human error.

Not surprisingly, a separate question found people were less trusted to keep organization IT systems safe (16%) than were machines (31%).

A role for AI.

Enterprises will never be able to hire enough humans to fix problems created by human error. Existing methods that companies and agencies employ leave considerable room for error, with 25% of all security patches deployed by organizations failing to reach every device. When U.S.-based CEOs cite cybersecurity as the number one external concern for their business in 2019, the simple act of patching (and failing) is a huge unresolved risk. Why should humans have to fix this problem alone, when autonomous capabilities are available to improve IT security.

Some vendors may place blame on customers for incorrectly configuring computing resources, but Oracle understands customers deserve more, and should have the option to do less, which is why we use autonomous technologies to secure customer systems. With the cybersecurity workforce gap growing, deploying AI is the best way to supplement human abilities and protect systems more efficiently.

Oracle’s investment of $6 billion each year to address problems like automated patching and security configuration translates into real action taken to protect our customers. Oracle created the world’s first autonomous database, a defining technology for this next generation of AI-led software and cloud services. Our self-repairing, self-tuning, self-patching autonomous technology helps protect businesses and governments from threats wherever they originate.

By taking on this responsibility, Oracle empowers enterprises to redeploy the scarce human talent of their cybersecurity workforce to address new priorities, not basic security hygiene. Enterprises that adopt autonomous technologies broadly and quickly will help eliminate an entire category of cyber risk (patching)–and stop repeating the pattern of human-error induced insecurity in the future.

With 52 percent of shoppers reporting their favorite way to shop is still in store, retailers must continually push the boundaries of in-store experiences. For shoppers, convenience reigns supreme—they want to get in and out with the goods they were seeking, which can only happen when inventory is accessible and smart, connected associates are ready to help. Enabling brands to deliver on this promise, Oracle Retail has continued to evolve its Xstore Point-of-Service (POS) and Oracle hardware systems.  

The new Workstation 655 and 625 models feature a sleek, contemporary design that is built with a tough, but minimal footprint. The Workstation 6 models come preinstalled with the ‘Oracle Linux for MICROS’ operating system or Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. This enables retailers such as McColl’s or Burberry, to concentrate on their core mission of delivering the customer experience most aligned with their brand, without sacrificing scale or long-term growth.

“McColl’s performs more than four million customer transactions per week through 2,700 POS terminals and we need fast and reliable store systems to support our customers and store colleagues,” said Neil Hodge, information technology director, McColl’s. “We chose Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and the Oracle hardware because it is an adaptable solution capable of supporting our growth as operational requirements change.”

Oracle’s platform for modern retail allows retailers to select the format that best fits their unique brand image and customer expectations. This may be a fully mobile store, discrete fixed units or a combination, which is increasingly common. The form factor is just as important as having an integrated hardware and software point-of-service (POS) solutions that provide consistency across interfaces, features and functionality. This consistency ensures a seamless experience for both the consumer and the associate, helping reduce errors, increase speed and enhance the interaction with the inclusion of rich customer data.  

For example, using the customer data in Xstore on their mobile tablet, a store associate can guide a shopper to the newest shoe from their favorite brand, check inventory in the customer’s size and then complete the transaction right there in the shoe department. A seamless, convenient experience for both the shopper and associate.

As retailers explore new store formats and seek agility in their experiences, Oracle offers a hardware footprint engineered from the ground up including industry-leading peripherals, operating system, application servers, and database, all designed to run and enhance the Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service experience right out of the box.

“Our latest hardware delivers a modern look and feel, and a more streamlined and resilient user-friendly footprint, which supports full feature store applications,” said Jeff Warren, vice president of strategy for Oracle Retail.  “Couple this with our hardware service offering and the result is an agile approach that enables retailers of all sizes to pick and choose the POS that is most brand-appropriate to their image, without sacrificing software features and functionality.”

The Oracle Retail Hardware portfolio is fully integrated with the Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and supporting omnichannel suite. The cohesive solution can provide retailers a wide range of benefits including faster implementation, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), a consistent user experience, and investment protection that will accommodate future upgrades.

Every year, millions of avoidable asset failures go unnoticed until the damage is done. While the proliferation of smart sensors and devices are enabling assets to “talk” about their health, utilities have struggled to decode this barrage of new data to hear and understand them. With advanced analytics and pre-built data visualizations in Oracle Work and Asset Cloud Service (WACS), utilities can quickly reveal the story their assets are telling to drive faster, more accurate decisions at a fraction of the cost.

“With a new natural gas-fired plant coming online in 2023, it was critical that we had a modern asset management system in place to track our diverse assets,” said Steve Saunders, director of information technology, Seminole Electric. “Oracle WACS will enable Seminole to quickly visualize all of our assets so that we can focus on delivering the most reliable service to our members.”

Breaking down data silos, WACS brings together best-in-class capabilities for asset and operational device management, GIS and mobile field service in one platform. Unlike other solutions that only offer the star schema for reporting, WACS today offers 118 pre-defined visualizations and 57 base calculations out-of-the-box, with additional visualization options planned. With data displayed on easy to consume dashboards, utilities gain the ability to bypass the need for costly data manipulation and can get key intelligence into the hands of business stakeholders quickly. And with all the data coming from the same reporting structure, utilities can compare metrics and benchmark their performance against set goals and KPIs.

“Asset failures are consistently linked to costly and devastating issues for utilities,” said Dan Byrnes, SVP of product development, Oracle Utilities. “It’s critical that utilities do less guessing and more listening when it comes to the health of their assets. Being able to not only manage the massive amounts of data coming in but also visualize it in a way that elicits action is the holy grail in keeping assets performing effectively and safely. WACS enables utility stakeholders to make sense of their data right out-of-the-box—no business analyst degree needed.”

The pre-built visualizations allow users to slice data such as failure count or cost by elements like the asset type or manufacturer. Users can also choose from an extensive library of pre-built calculations such as Mean Time Between Failure or Asset Availability to quickly build their own visualizations sliced any way they want. With data also flowing freely into the system from smart, connected assets and devices, utilities can identify and easily visualize infrastructure weaknesses throughout the lifecycle of the asset. This includes asset acquisition, set-up, and performance—such as predictive maintenance, repair, and inspection activities—through to the purchasing and inventory of parts.

WACS empowers electric, gas, and water utilities of all sizes to cost-effectively measure and continually improve performance by providing centralized support of fixed and linear assets and a growing portfolio of intelligent devices, to help:

• Prevent failure: by providing ways to identify risks of asset failure faster and easier; eliminating the day-to-day tasks of collecting data and maintaining separate systems of record, and; having the full breadth of asset performance data at the ready to make business and investment decisions.
• Enhance intelligence: 118 prebuilt visualizations, nine data subject areas, and 57 base calculations, with more planned to be added regularly, make it easy for utilities to visualize and “hear” what their assets are saying. Utilities can also integrate data coming from their other investments, such as SCADA systems, to give a truly holistic view of their operations and asset health.
• Take action: effectively without losing time and resources to investigate faults; create work orders based on the criticality of the asset and schedule the field visits and crews accordingly, and; manage and monitor work progress via dashboards.
• Optimize performance: of an asset maintenance program by benchmarking performance. This enables utilities to accurately plan their investments based on asset conditions and to implement ISO 55000 plans quickly to generate results faster.

In a recent study, sixty-four percent of utilities noted that cloud computing is critical to their company’s future success, in large part due to the need to better manage an ever-growing pool of data coming from smart meters, IoT sensors, etc. Utilities realize that it is becoming too great a task and risk to manage this influx without a significant investment in tools that can capture and analyze data quickly. To learn more about how Oracle WACS is helping utilities manage this deluge of data, visit here.

The proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) and new field data sources has made managing the energy grid significantly more complex. Helping utilities turn this challenge into an opportunity, Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS) now features advanced supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) capabilities. With the offering, grid operators gain real-time intelligence and control over all types of field devices and DERs without having to rely on distribution SCADA additions or upgrades.

Built on industry standards and integration best practices, the new SCADA applications are the result of an exclusive collaboration between Oracle Utilities and LiveData Utilities, a silver level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Based on LiveData’s Operational Technology Message Bus (OTMB) server platform, the jointly developed technology is delivered and supported within Oracle Utilities NMS, giving utilities an integrated, real-time grid management platform with a single user interface and point of contact. The offering can easily integrate data from existing SCADA platforms, field and IoT devices, DERs and grid-edge sensor points across a wide array of communications protocols.

“Whether a utility is dealing with high DER penetration or simply needing to expand its network control to field devices and sensors, Oracle NMS SCADA applications provide the ability to scale to give grid operators more control, greater flexibility and faster response times,” said Brad Williams, vice president of industry strategy at Oracle Utilities. “The offering addresses traditional real-time SCADA requirements and much more, from power line sensors to rooftop solar inverters, all with real-time speed. When every second counts in extreme events, this is a game-changer for utilities.”

To see the new solution in action, visit DistribuTECH booth #2809.

Data intelligence across any distribution grid asset

The SCADA capabilities in NMS represents a technological leap beyond legacy solutions. As a fully embedded, scalable component of the Oracle NMS platform, the OTMB communications adapter enables real-time communications to substations, distribution network assets and DERs, as well as grid devices and energy resources well beyond the SCADA network. As such, grid operators get instant visibility across their network, even without an existing distribution SCADA or distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) in place.

“This combined offering provides utilities the ability to monitor and control equipment and devices while reducing integration complexity for real-time operational technology and systems,” said Brad Harkavy, president, LiveData Utilities. “With this solution, utilities have a comprehensive toolkit to integrate best of breed OT solutions and to bridge the gap between the OT and IT worlds, creating a true convergence platform.”

The SCADA applications can also be applied to Oracle Utilities Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) solution. Used in tandem, utilities can monitor DERs in real-time and proactively optimize their distribution networks around the behavior of both utility and customer-owned resources such as rooftop PV, behind-the-meter energy storage and electric vehicles—all of which may or may not be connected to a utility’s legacy SCADA network.