Oracle CloudWorld 2022: 4 Key announcements

US-based software and cloud company Oracle has announced new cloud products and partnerships at its annual CloudWorld 2022 event, held in Las Vegas from October 17–20th. 

Healthcare was a key talking point at the event with a special focus on how cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged for the sector that has seen massive adoption of digital technologies, especially after the covid-19 pandemic.  

In September, Oracle reported that revenue from its cloud application business had increased 43% year-on-year (YoY) last quarter, to $2.7 billion. In the company’s latest quarterly earnings call in September too, company chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said “multi-cloud interoperability is one of the reasons our infrastructure business is booming—growing over 50% in USD and almost 60% in constant dollars.”  

Here are some of the key announcements from CloudWorld 2022: 

New cloud infrastructure platform - Alloy 

One of the key announcements at the event was the new cloud infrastructure platform called Alloy, which will enable organizations such as financial institutions, telcos, and other sectors as well as system integrators (SIs) to become 'cloud providers' and roll out Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services to their customers. 

This means that companies can use Alloy independently in their own data centers and fully control their operations to help address specific regulatory requirements. 

In addition to becoming cloud providers, Alloy will also enable partners that host customers in their own data centers to unlock new opportunities for growth beyond the public cloud, said Kapil Makhija, Vice President-Technology (Cloud), Oracle India.

Expanding partnership with Nvidia 

Oracle entered into an expanded, multi-year partnership with chip company Nvidia to help its customers accelerate the adoption of AI and its cloud infrastructure. 

Through this partnership, Oracle plans to use tens of thousands of Nvidia's GPUs, including the A100 and upcoming H100, to accelerate the pace of computing and AI advancements in its cloud infrastructure. The collaboration will bring Nvidia’s full accelerated computing stack — from GPUs to systems to software — to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). 

Oracle said that, along with OCI’s AI cloud infrastructure of bare metal, cluster networking, and storage, enterprises will get a broad, accessible portfolio of options for AI training and deep learning. 

 “Our expanded alliance will deliver the best of both companies' expertise to help customers across industries — from healthcare and manufacturing to telecommunications and financial services — overcome the multitude of challenges they face,” said Safra Catz, CEO, of Oracle.  

Fusion Cloud suite with special focus on healthcare  

Oracle updated its Fusion Cloud suite of cloud-based business applications with a set of new capabilities focused on the healthcare sector and hi-tech industries. 

Fusion Cloud is a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications comprising Cloud HCM application, an enterprise performance management application called Oracle Cloud EPM, and Cloud supply chain management (SCM). It is used by organizations to manage their supply chains, generate revenue forecasts, and perform other core business tasks. 

The suite is an important component of Oracle’s cloud strategy and the healthcare sector is also an increasingly important focus area for the company. For example, Oracle has equipped Cloud EPM with a set of pre-built analytics dashboards and reports aimed at use cases in the healthcare sector. 

Last December, Oracle also signed a deal to acquire healthcare technology provider Cerner Corp. for approximately $28.3 billion. Cerner sells software that healthcare organizations use to manage electronic patient records. 

“With industry-specific planning capabilities in Oracle Cloud EPM, healthcare organizations can embrace best practices and leverage innovative technologies to enhance insight, optimize planning and forecasting, reduce costs, and improve patient care,” said Matthew Bradley, the senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. 

MySQL HeatWave for Microsoft Azure  

Oracle also announced it's Oracle MySQL HeatWave is now available in the Microsoft Azure cloud. MySQL HeatWave is a cloud-based database service that will allow enterprises to run machine learning (ML), analytics, and online transaction processing workloads as a single service on Azure Cloud. It was made available on the AWS cloud last month. 

Currently available in beta, MySQL HeatWave will be generally available in 1HCY23. 

Oracle also announced new MySQL Autopilot capabilities that improve performance and make MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse easy to use. 

“For our Indian customers especially, we understand that saving time and receiving efficient results is one of the top priorities therefore we believe that MySQL Autopilot’s capabilities such as Auto-provisioning, and Auto query plan improvement will prove useful and the users will receive increased performance of MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse while saving significant time,” said Srikanth Doranadula, Vice President - Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India.