In this Cloud Wars Special Report, Bob Evans sits down with Mike Sicilia, CEO of Oracle, to discuss Oracle’s rise to the number-two position on the Cloud Wars Top 10. Their conversation explores why customers are increasingly gravitating toward Oracle, how AI embedded across infrastructure and applications is accelerating time to value, and why openness, multi-cloud flexibility, and data gravity are reshaping enterprise decision-making.
Oracle AI Strategy and Products
The Big Themes:
- AI Built In, Not Bolted On: Oracle’s momentum is rooted in embedding AI directly into its database, data platform, infrastructure, and applications rather than layering it on later. This architectural decision enables customers to train models, run inference, and deploy intelligent applications faster and more reliably. AI is foundational across ERP, retail merchandising, healthcare, and industry solutions. By integrating AI at every layer, Oracle reduces friction, accelerates adoption, and delivers immediate business value, helping customers move beyond experimentation into production-scale AI initiatives with confidence and speed.
- AI Changes Customer Engagement Models: The traditional technology upgrade cycle has been replaced by continuous, iterative innovation. With quarterly Fusion updates delivering hundreds of new AI-enabled features automatically, customers see constant improvements without added cost or disruption. Sicilia noted that AI data platforms and agent-building tools now enable daily innovation.
- Scale, Responsibility, and Customer Trust: With more than half a trillion dollars in contractual commitments, Oracle’s leadership views execution and trust as paramount. Sicilia says that Oracle’s decades-long experience running no-fail, mission-critical systems uniquely positions it for the AI Era. Customer success, support, and operational alignment have been restructured around an “AI-first, service-first” mindset.
The Big Quote: “Very quick time to value has a lot to do with data gravity, and we are the custodians of the data. We are, in fact, the creators of a lot of the data from our applications.””
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