The context and purpose behind this series: “The 17 Companies Reshaping the Landscape of Enterprise AI“.
Who They Are
From its founding in 1977 to today, Oracle has risen to be a formidable competitor in the Cloud Wars – currently sitting at #6 on the Cloud Wars Top 10. And, through the decades, Founder Larry Ellison has at been at the helm steering the ship until handing things over to current CEO, Safra Catz, in 2014.
But let’s take a step back…back in the mid-90s, Ellison saw the power of the internet and realized that by building internet-ready products in advance of customer demand, Oracle was able to lead the market when fully functional internet-powered offerings became the standard for enterprise
computing.
Since then, Oracle has evolved to harness the power of the cloud which was fully rolled out in 2013. On top of this foundation, Oracle Autonomous Database was launched which included self-patching, self-tuning, and self-managing.
Consumers are picky, and the youngest generation, they won’t even use products that they don’t feel have been produced ethically or sustainably. Ultimately, it’s about having the information to make better decisions, whether they’re sourcing decisions or decisions related to distribution, and technology is absolutely critical to those decisions. // Safra Catz, CEO – Oracle
The continuous innovation hasn’t stopped as Oracle recently opened its Oracle Industries Innovation Lab to simulate the intersection of technology, people, and work. According to Oracle, the purpose here is: “Technology is driving rapid change across the project and asset lifecycle. The Innovation Lab helps organizations experiment, learn, and stay on the leading edge.“
The strong focus on industry-specific solutions is what Oracle will be emphasizing during Cloud Wars Expo in the Opening Keynote of the Industry Cloud Battleground LIVE led by Mike Sicilia, EVP at Oracle.
“In many ways, it is a B-to-B-to-C relationship for Oracle, as our customer’s customer is actually using the technology,” Mike noted. “We are at the forefront, and we are helping these industries transform.”
This collaboration with Oracle’s customers and partner ecosystem has led to its continued growth and strong competitive position in the Cloud Wars. Further evidence of this is in a recent Market Cap Madness post from Cloud Wars Founder, Bob Evans where he highlights how Oracle had overtaken Salesforce.
What was Bob’s reasoning behind this?
As customers pick applications from cloud application companies and big infrastructure from cloud infrastructure companies they need to interconnect – they’re not going to be using one cloud. In fact, they need to interconnect their on-premise workloads with their cloud workloads, they need to interconnect their infrastructure cloud provider with their application cloud provider so this whole idea of multi-cloud is going to be very important going forward.
// Larry Ellison – Founder & CTO, Oracle
Source: Chat with Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, on Oracle and VMware partnership
Bob put it this way, “In a compelling battle that’s had several lead changes, Oracle’s market cap of $223 billion makes it the world’s most highly valued enterprise-apps provider with a comfortable lead over Salesforce’s $216 billion. For now—although I expect this to change as its full potential in the cloud becomes more apparent—SAP is well behind at $132 billion.”
What They Do
Oracle’s fortitude to be shoulder-to-shoulder with other strong tech players show they have developed a solid foundation of products and services. This foundation provides enterprise-ready solutions for organizations of all sizes.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The next-generation cloud designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less.
Oracle Cloud Applications
Complete suite of cloud applications engineered to work together // ERP, SCM, CX, HCM
Hardware and
Software
Scalable engineered systems, servers, & storage that enable enterprises to optimize application and database performance, protect crucial data, and lower costs.
Taking things further, Oracle realized that artificial intelligence needs to be democratized to get it into the hands of the right people and teams. So, in November 2021, Oracle officially announced its AI services infused into its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The intent is to provide new capabilities and customer experiences, and “empower employees with better information, and improve and automate business operations.”
Additionally, Oracle shared its commitment to make AI accessible to everyone by stating it this way:
We’re giving developers the ability to build their own models and the ability to easily consume already-built ML models and extend apps and solutions, without needing to be machine learning experts. We are making AI services easy to leverage collaboratively across all your developer and data science teams with integrated data labeling, consistent APIs, and common discovery across model and dataset catalogs. Finally, we are doing all this with a deep commitment to open frameworks to use open source and third-party tools and full portability.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Blog // https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/announcing-oci-ai-services
Most Unique Application
In an interview led by Burcin Kaplanoglu, VP of Oracle’s Industries Innovation Lab, AI and machine learning took the center stage with its impact in the construction and engineering industry. Burcin sat down with Roz Buick, Oracle’s senior vice president product, strategy, and development – Construction and Engineering, to understand the innovation happening in construction.
Underpinning this success AI for the construction industry is Oracle’s Construction Intelligence Cloud Service. This is tailor-made to drive key business benefits in these areas:
- Leverages data across all the phases of your projects and assets to drive rapid data-driven decision making
- Uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to generate actionable intelligence for proactive intervention
- Creates forecasts and predictions to help you identify and address issues before they can adversely impact a project
- Actively monitors your project data to raise early warnings and uncover hidden risks
- Fast time to value—easy to set up and use with no complex IT effort or specialist knowledge required
The areas all culminate into the Oracle Innovation Lab experiences providing hands-on, interactive ways to see and understand how technology enables the “fast time to value” – or in other words, accelerate the time to dazzle customers.
Note: The grand opening of the Oracle Innovation Lab took place in April 2022 and featured 19 experiences across 5 industries and was made possible through an ecosystem of 28 partners. I had the opportunity to attend the event and will be showcasing the experiences and industries in an Oracle Innovation series running through the Acceleration Economy site.
Who They Have Impacted
Rosendin has made a name for itself across multiple different industries. However, at its core, Rosendin’s mission is “Building Quality. Building Value. Building People.®” by leading very complex construction projects.
Further, Rosendin believes that success is shared through committed, connected, and engaged people and communities which has led to its success being recognized.
Top -3
Consistently recognized as a Top Electrical Contractor by ENR
80+
Awards and certificates received for safety excellence since 2011
100+
Charitable organizations supported by Rosendin nationwide
In a recent interview, Matt Lamb, CIO at Rosendin Electric, chatted with Burcin Kaplanoglu, VP of Oracle’s Innovation Lab, on the challenges that they faced in the construction industry.
When asked on the state of innovation in the industry, Matt stated,
“We are in the middle of the big tech wave. We’re seeing a lot of the anchors from other verticals stepping in and making headway into the construction space. We’re seeing a lot of long-time construction technology leaders continuing to evolve and grow either through acquisitions or new technology offerings that they’re providing based on feedback from the industry. And I think there’s a lot of new things coming out with robotics, AI, and just other general tech that has really started pushing us forward.”
The root of challenge was to harness all the volumes of data streaming in from different sources – and make sense of it in a strategic way. This is where “the art of construction meets the science of data” brings Oracle’s Predictive Artificial Intelligence in Construction to life.
The biggest opportunity for AI, Matt noted, “I think it’s in our data. As an industry, and as our individual respective companies, we have so much data, and a lot of us don’t even realize it. Whether you have a big ERP system or your company is on QuickBooks and Excel doesn’t matter. You have a ton of data, and you have some way that you’re tracking a lot of the information that you need to have to make smarter and better decisions. And I think some of the bigger guys can do it because they have the funding, and we’re starting to see that propagate down a little further.”
Matt further stated, “The key to having these types of systems with AI and ML is having good questions to ask the system. And we need to work on those questions because we’re asking them the same ones that we’ve been asking forever. While we’re getting traction with it, there’s a whole new set of questions that this technology can answer that we just haven’t asked yet. And those are the questions that will change how we do business, not only as our companies, but as an industry. We’re going to have insight into so much more information that’s really been hidden under the topsoil that’s going to allow us to grow, allow us to work more efficiently, allow us to work safely. As we start seeing the value to what we’ve done with the data we have, it will only further propel us.”
Closing Thoughts
Yes, AI and ML are creating massive value for customers, but the real success here is the co-innovation with customers. This co-innovation is what brings customers back to companies like Oracle to know how to achieve what’s next.
Oracle has tapped into something unique with the Innovation Lab which will continue to evolve through its continued partnerships – and listening to customers.
Want to gain more insights from Cloud Wars Expo?
Starting on July 20th, more than 40 hours of on-demand cloud education content will be available for free to Acceleration Economy Subscribers.
