While Oracle AI World will showcase not one but two new CEOs, lots of new AI agents, some big infrastructure innovations, some new go-to-market wrinkles and partnerships, and very likely a powerful new AI database, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison just keeps on rolling and roiling.
Into his 49th year as the intellectual and inspirational leader of Oracle — whose market cap has spiked 76% this year to about $835 billion — the 81-year-old Ellison will use his AI World keynote to describe not just where his company is headed but indeed where the increasingly AI-powered world is headed.
But of all the new stuff Ellison will be describing, I’ll be particularly interested in what he chooses to say about Oracle’s new CEOs, Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia. And while Magouyrk and Sicilia have given many high-profile keynotes at previous Oracle events, this week will mark the first time they’re doing so as CEOs. Former CEO Safra Catz, who recently stepped out of that role to become Executive Vice Chairman and make way for the ascension of Sicilia and Magouyrk, is expected to play a low-profile role at the event.
For the past six years, Catz and Ellison have each showcased Oracle’s innovations and success with customers, with Catz chatting with several customers during her main-stage presentations while Ellison maps out the Oracle tech roadmap.
And while Ellison has traditionally been the sole speaker during his keynotes, that changed dramatically last year as Ellison welcomed AWS CEO Matt Garman — and no, that’s not a hallucination — to join him for a fireside chat, with an executive from mutual customer State Street Bank joining the conversation a few minutes later.
That striking moment — the CEO of AWS not only appearing and speaking at an Oracle event, but also being introduced and welcomed onstage by Larry Ellison — showed Ellison at his absolute best as a larger-than-life leader able to effect changes that just about every other human being on Earth would have called impossible.
Garman’s appearance capped off a stunning string of agreements forged by Ellison with three of Oracle’s major rivals — Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS — under which those three companies sell the Oracle Database within their clouds to their customers (again, not a hallucination).
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More miracles on tap for this week?
Could we see a similar level of strategic-partnership magic at this year’s AI World? I think it’s not only possible, but also indeed likely — because in the past couple of years, Ellison and Oracle seem to have tapped into some pretty serious wizardry:
The breakthrough partnerships with the other three hyperscalers who have agreed to, and appear to be very happy with, an arrangement whereby they sell the Oracle Database to their customers. It’s been more than a year since all those agreements were forged, and the sheer audacity of that caper still makes my head spin.
Then there was Ellison’s wooing of one of the world’s hottest AI companies, OpenAI, out of an intensely close and initially exclusive relationship with Microsoft and into an equally intense but even larger partnership with Oracle, resulting in the launch early this year of the Stargate alliance (Stargate is the broad term for OpenAI infrastructure).
But then came the latest and biggest stunner: OpenAI’s commitment to spend $300 billion (that’s billion with a “b”, not million with an “m”) over 10 years for AI training and inferencing.
Can Oracle top that?
It can be tempting to think that no, there’s no way Oracle or anybody else can outdo a $300-billion 10-year deal — surely one of, if not the largest, business deals ever fashioned.
But don’t forget that we’re talking about Larry Ellison, a guy who has made heads spin for almost 50 years. And the passage of time has made Ellison even bolder than he was before, and has given him the ability to convince others — Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS, OpenAI — to join him in dreaming even bigger dreams.
So I think that as AI World kicks off today, it would not be crazy to expect the unexpected from Ellison and Oracle’s two new CEOS.
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