Transformational technologies today.

Technology has always shaped and transformed the way we live and work. As technologies develop, new opportunities emerge to change the way we do things—from how we run our businesses, to how we communicate, make purchases, spend our leisure time, and live our lives.

Now, three technologies have emerged with the potential to radically transform the world we live in like never before:

Internet of Things (IoT)

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Blockchain

In this ebook, we’ll explore these transformational technologies in detail, outlining their benefits and capabilities. And we’ll show how—when it comes to keeping up with cloud-native competitors—there’s no time to waste in embracing these new innovations.

Finally, we’ll discuss how Oracle can help you transform your business with IoT, AI, and blockchain in the cloud today.

The arrival of transformational technology.

New technologies have always enabled us to do new things. However, because they have generally come along in isolation, they have been easier to adopt and exploit. Now, multiple innovations are emerging at once—from 3D printing to virtual and augmented reality, among others.

While all of these technologies present exciting opportunities, there are three that are accelerating change much faster and in more exciting ways than we’ve ever experienced. IoT, AI, and blockchain are transforming everything from city infrastructure to transport, home entertainment, financial transactions, manufacturing, data protection, and many others.

Sensing, thinking, remembering.

To understand these three transformational technologies, it helps to think of them as interconnected organic processes. IoT is like your nervous system, sensing the world by collecting and transmitting data via billions of connected devices around the world. AI is like your brain, analyzing all of that data and using it to think and make decisions, or perform actions that only humans could previously carry out. And blockchain is like your memory, creating a secure, indelible record of transactions and data exchanges.

While they’re highly powerful in their own right, when used together, IoT, AI, and blockchain become truly transformative. By harnessing all three, you can radically streamline and enhance existing processes. You can create new products and services for a generation of digitally experienced consumers. You can use insights to improve customer experience and make more-informed decisions. And you can drive your business to new levels of success.

Transforming to keep up.

The capabilities of IoT, AI, and blockchain are so powerful that they require a shift in the way you run your business. Transformation is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime change, nor is it about simply adapting your organization to work with one new technology. In this new digital world, technological disruption has become a constant process of evolution, and only those that keep pace with the latest developments will succeed.

It’s also important to remember that many of your competitors are already using these emerging technologies to gain an advantage. So the question is not whether you’ll start embracing them, but when. Because the longer you leave it, the more opportunities your competitors have to move ahead.

The internet of change.

IoT is the central nervous system, using billions of sensors to collect and transmit huge volumes of data. Practically anything can be equipped with a sensor to gather data—all of which can be viewed in real time, enabling faster, better-informed decisions.

Practical applications.

IoT is already being used to make improvements in a number of industries, from the public sector to manufacturing, transportation, automotive, consumer goods, and healthcare.

In manufacturing, smart factories can use IoT to:

• Monitor the health and efficiency of equipment
• Minimize costs and downtime
• Maximize productivity

In healthcare, IoT helps to provide remote care for patients. With smart devices monitoring key variables, health practitioners can:

• Monitor patients in real time
• Identify issues faster
• Determine whether a patient needs to attend the hospital
• Increase patient satisfaction and outcomes
• Reduce waiting lists
• Save patients from making unnecessary trips

IoT is also helping to drive innovation within the automotive industry, as vehicles become more connected, autonomous, shared, and electric. Manufacturers can use insights from the data collected by sensors within vehicles to:

• Track and monitor component wear
• Predict when they might fail
• Adjust vehicle designs
• Offer preventative maintenance to customers

Room to grow.

It’s estimated that by 2020, there will be 20.4 billion IoT devices in circulation,² generating in excess of 14 zettabytes of data every year.³ But while there is clearly huge potential in IoT, there’s also a long way to go before industries fully embrace the possibilities of this new technology. Up to now, IoT projects have been costly and difficult to implement, meaning only a fraction of the available data is currently being analyzed and put to practical use.

Organizations need to build on their existing technology, infrastructure, and capabilities to minimize the cost and complexity of implementing IoT. That way, they can speed up their time to value, and start transforming sooner. To fully take advantage of IoT, they must:

• Build and adopt an ecosystem of IoT-enabled devices
• Source, store, and manage enormous amounts of data
• Adopt sophisticated analytics and machine learning capabilities
• Create new IoT applications that exploit data insights
• Integrate IoT into existing applications and workflows
• Deploy end-to-end security
• Monitor and manage the entire value chain

Oracle and IoT.

At Oracle, our goal is to make implementation as easy and cost-effective as possible. To enable this, we offer five powerful, ready-to-use IoT applications:

Oracle Production Monitoring Cloud
Delivers a commanding view of factories, machines, and products.

Read more

Oracle Asset Monitoring Cloud
Provides real-time insights from connected assets.

Read more

Oracle Fleet Monitoring Cloud
Tracks and manages connected vehicles.

Read more

Oracle Service Monitoring for Connected Assets Cloud
Enables excellent customer service.

Read more

Oracle Connected Worker Cloud
Provides real-time visibility of worker health, location, and work environments.

Read more

All of these applications are designed to work with our SaaS applications, including enterprise resource management (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), human capital management (HCM), and others. You can also build your own custom apps or services, using our powerful, integrated cloud platform. Plus, you have the choice of deployment models: in the public cloud, or Oracle Cloud at Customer—the power of the public cloud in your data center.

See how Oracle Production Monitoring Cloud enables production managers to monitor equipment health through IoT, and address issues before they affect production.

²Gartner Newsroom ³Forbes

A truly intelligent innovation.

If IoT is the nervous system sensing the world, AI is the brain that enables us to analyze and better understand it. And within the broad field of AI, machine learning is set to make the greatest impact. By analyzing massive amounts of data, it enables faster, more-informed decision-making—either in support or in place of human thinking. It can also be used to carry out mundane tasks that would generally require human intervention, or those that are too complicated for people to undertake.

Disrupting multiple industries.

Machine learning has the power to transform many areas. In human resources (HR), for example, it can be used to:

• Analyze the suitability of potential candidates quickly
• Streamline recruitment processes
• Help HR teams to understand employees’ performance and needs
• Enable improved development programs
• Increase staff retention and maximize productivity

The telecommunications industry can use machine learning to identify and address network faults. Financial institutions can use it to accurately detect fraud. AI-powered customer service chatbots can react to people faster and more efficiently than call center staff. And in the automotive industry, machine learning is making arguably its greatest impact, powering not only the brains behind autonomous vehicles, but also enabling smart-city transportation infrastructures.

It’s hard to think of an industry that won’t benefit from machine learning, or a technology that has more potential for transformation.

Slow to start.

Despite the immense possibilities, we’re yet to see a significant uptake of groundbreaking, machine learning–powered products and services. Again, this is due to the challenges involved in implementing the technology and reaping its business benefits. Organizations need to think of it as an incremental process involving a number of key steps, including:

• Recognizing opportunities for enhanced intelligence within the business or supply chain
• Accumulating and storing huge amounts of data—both internal and external, structured and unstructured
• Attracting and retaining talent with the skills to implement machine learning
• Integrating machine learning into both new and existing applications
• Deploying it across multiple functions
• Applying it to existing infrastructure and capabilities, rather than starting from scratch

Oracle and machine learning.

Machine learning is not just a futuristic concept—it’s already being used today, with the potential to be exploited in many other exciting, disruptive ways. That’s why we have connected our core applications—ERP, SCM, and HCM—with ready-to-use machine learning capabilities. We call them adaptive intelligent applications, and together, they help to create the connected enterprise.

We’re also building automation into our cloud platform services to create self-driving, self-securing databases, analytics, security, management, and more. And all of these applications can be easily accessed and used through Oracle Digital Assistant.

What really sets Oracle apart, however, is our data. To get the most out of machine learning, it needs to be enriched with large volumes of high-quality data. And we can give you access to huge volumes of it, thanks to Oracle Data Cloud—the world’s single largest marketplace of third-party data.

Find out how UiPath is partnering with Oracle to apply machine learning and serve their customers better.

The building blocks of future data.

With IoT as the nervous system collecting data, and AI as the brain analyzing it, you need a way to ensure that transactions are securely processed and recorded. That’s where blockchain comes in.

Known as the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchain is the foundation of high-trust computing—bringing reliability, transparency, and security to data exchanges of all kinds. From financial transactions to contractual agreements, legal agreements, and changes of ownership, blockchain uses a decentralized, distributed, and shared digital ledger to ensure an unalterable record of every exchange. This removes the need for third-party intermediaries, enabling faster processes, real-time transaction visibility, and reduced costs.

The possibilities of blockchain.

Blockchain has the potential to transform businesses of all sizes, across multiple industries and sectors, including:

Financial services

Insurance

Ecommerce

Healthcare

HR

In the consumer goods sector, blockchain will use asset tracking to provide transparency at every stage—enhancing accountability, streamlining product recalls, and improving consumer trust. In healthcare, it can be used to create chain-of-custody logging and tracking to:

• Simplify the authentication of medications
• Reduce the risk of receiving counterfeit goods
• Make it easier to recall out-of-date drugs

In education and research, blockchain can help to ensure intellectual property rights are upheld. And, of course, it’s at the very heart of the fintech revolution, enabling disruption in the financial landscape.

Getting started.

In the same way that industries are yet to realize the full potential of IoT and AI, adoption of blockchain is also relatively slow. The problem? Again, implementation can be hard, time-consuming, and costly. Among the chief barriers to adoption are:

• Lack of regulation of blockchain miners
• Everyone who joins a blockchain network must agree to be bound by its rules
• Blockchain contracts are currently untested in court
• Blockchain must be integrated with existing systems of record
• Few current use cases offer compelling or immediate return on investment
• Traditional stakeholders remain risk-averse

The potential impact of blockchain is still largely untested—even on a theoretical level. And if it is to be truly explored and exploited, these barriers first need to be overcome.

Oracle and blockchain.

At Oracle, we want to make all transformational technologies powerfully simple to put to work. That’s why Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is easy to implement, cost-effective, and capable of accelerating time to value while maintaining security and resilience.

Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service:

• Is an industrial blockchain platform, designed for the enterprise
• Is production-ready and preassembled—simple to deploy and integrate
• Is delivered with a wide range of software development kits and application programming interfaces (APIs) for ease of integration
• Makes it simple to add smart contracts to interactions with third parties
• Is easy to secure, thanks to Oracle’s powerful identity management service
• Is simple to monitor and manage—either through Oracle’s administrative console, or existing operational tools
• Makes it easy to connect to existing applications, or create entirely new ones

And before long, we’ll be embedding blockchain into our powerful suite of connected SaaS applications—including SCM and ERP—making blockchain even easier to use.

See how IntellectEU is partnering with Oracle to establish trust by creating new blockchain services.

Technologies transform better together.

As we’ve discussed, IoT, AI, and blockchain each have the power to radically disrupt numerous industries and change the way we do things. But combined, they go far beyond their individual capabilities, complementing each other to provide exponentially greater transformative possibilities.

Internet of Things

Artificial Intelligence

Blockchain

Technology combined.

One good example is in the home. Currently, virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana are adept at responding to commands—for example, ordering products or recommending a playlist. Powered by transformational technology, however, they can be much more proactive. With all three technologies combined, that same assistant could use IoT data from your smart refrigerator to determine that you’re nearly out of milk. With machine learning, it could work out which retailers sell your preferred brand and who has it cheapest, then place an order for you. And with blockchain, it can ensure the transaction is processed securely and the correct item is delivered on time.

Another big advance is in healthcare. Currently, patients decide when to see their doctor, and usually only when symptoms are showing. With transformational technology combined, patients could be fitted with IoT-enabled sensors or devices. Machine learning could monitor that data to determine if any irregularities arise. The patient’s virtual assistant could then cross-reference their calendar with their doctor’s and schedule an appointment. And when the patient arrives, the doctor could access an accurate digital medical history, secured by blockchain.

Industrial transformation.

In addition to transforming and enhancing our lives and well-being, the benefits of combining these new technologies will be even more significant in industrial business practices. Take manufacturing, for example. With a cloud monitoring solution, production managers can:

• Remotely view every machine in every factory
• See real-time performance data for each piece of equipment
• Use machine learning to anticipate when a fault may occur
• Assign the right technician to the right job
• Raise work orders and order replacement parts securely through blockchain

Transformational technologies now.

While it may seem like a utopian vision of technological advancements to come, the truth is that these technologies are available today. And they’re ready to be put to work, transforming business, our professional and personal lives, and society as a whole. So, how can you make sure you keep up with the pace of change, and don’t fall behind your competitors? The answer is the cloud.

Implementing these technologies is really only possible in the cloud. Not only that, cloud levels the playing field—ensuring smaller companies can access the same compute power and resources as larger organizations, and traditional businesses can operate with the same agility as startups. Cloud enables innovation, minimizes IT spend, and accelerates adoption of these three transformational technologies.

The time to transform is now. At Oracle we’ve already integrated these technologies into our applications, and they’re all available with our SaaS offering. So you can start out at a level that suits you, then scale and implement new technologies as your business requires them.

Build tomorrow’s business, today.

Discover more about Oracle and transformational technologies at oracle.com/transformationaltechnologies