Oracle plans to aggressively leverage its AI, infrastructure, and industry expertise to help customers forge new cross-industry ecosystems enabling more-strategic and more-profitable relationships based on deeper understandings of each other’s capabilities, assets, data, and potential.
If that all sounds a little other-worldly, well, that’s good — because if it’s true that “AI changes everything” as Larry Ellison says (and that’s Oracle’s new tagline), then our vision for what the future holds should not be simply a slightly warmed-over version of yesterday’s meatloaf.
Oracle’s vision is built around its long and deep expertise in industry-specific solutions plus its hypergrowth Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) business plus AI’s astonishing ability to accelerate innovation and trigger new business models.
And now that Oracle has named as co-CEOs the leader of its industries business — Mike Sicilia — and the leader of its OCI unit — Clay Magouyrk, the company feels it’s in a strong position to help customers harness that accelerated innovation to forge new business models within and also beyond their traditional industries. For more on the priorities of those two new leaders, please see
“Oracle’s New CEOs: Uniquely Qualified to Fulfill Larry Ellison’s Vision for AI Revolution.”
Oracle held a conference call last week with financial analysts to discuss the move of former CEO Safra Catz to the new role of executive vice-chairman and the elevation of Sicilia and Magouyrk to their new CEO roles. (Oracle also promoted Executive VP of Operations Doug Kehring to Principal Financial Officer and Executive VP Mark Hura to President, Global Field Operations.)
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Listening to that call, I was particularly impressed with how Sicilia emphasized not so much the technology as wonderful as it is but rather its ability to help customers generate new growth via the creation of new business models and, as noted above, new ecosystems.
“Oracle has evolved from a technology provider to a strategic partner because of the depth and breadth of our offerings, and these technologies enable entirely new business models and open entirely new competitive opportunities,” Sicilia said.
“I’ve been engaged with our customers across a wide range of industries, from banking to healthcare to communications and many more. Our customers are increasingly interested in and seeing value in all of our offerings, from industry applications, to Fusion [LOB applications], to OCI, to database, and to our AI data platform. And as we help businesses transform, this also creates much bigger deals that are multiple times larger than what we experienced in the past.”
Later in the call, a financial analyst asked how Oracle intends to interconnect and enhance its OCI and industries strengths through the power of AI, and Sicilia provided some broad context on Oracle’s unique capabilities along with a compelling cross-industry example.
“A lot of the mission-critical data that’s going to be very important to inferencing is not part of the public Internet and has not been foundational in training large language models. We at Oracle are the custodian and the partner to our customers for that mission-critical data, be it back-office data, be it healthcare EHR data, be it retail merchandising data,” Sicilia said.
“And that puts us in a very unique position to deliver end-to-end industry-cloud suites.”
The magnitude of not only those customer transformations but also the potential of AI-infused infrastructure, industry apps, analytics, and databases are setting the stage for businesses to step up into entirely new types of relationships with one another.
“It’s becoming apparent to us that this is not just about selling and delivering this to enterprises: it’s actually about opening up new ecosystems,” Sicilia said.
And as an example, he cited the vastly different industries of healthcare and banking.
“One question might be, ‘Well, what do they have to do with one another?’ Well, banks loan a lot of money to healthcare organizations, but they do so with very poor telemetry into the receivables in that industry which, at least in the United States, is notoriously plagued by cash-flow problems. If you look at the publicly reported earnings reports of major healthcare institutions, they talk about days of cash on hand, not weeks, not months, not years.
“And this has caused a rather, shall we say, not ideal relationship for their liquidity and lending partners. So when we talk about an ecosystem — an AI-based ecosystem — banks can have a view into the healthcare organization’s leading indicators not just for payment and not just for quantitative issues but qualitative issues as well,” Sicilia explained.
“So if you have your hip replaced and you’re then readmitted to the emergency room 30 days or 60 days after and you’re a Medicare patient with value-based reimbursements, that changes the amount of the reimbursable.
And if you think about that at scale over large healthcare institutions, think about the changing relationships between banks and healthcare organizations.”
And Sicilia and Magouyrk believe Oracle can be the AI-powered matchmaker that turns can create and optimize this new model of data-enhanced business ecosystems.
“So yes, we’re a major supplier to both verticals with end-to-end cloud solutions, but actually connecting them is unique to the Oracle AI advantage,” Sicilia said.
“It’s unique to the amount of operational data and the amount of back-office data, and of course all the infrastructure that Clay has built makes it possible.”
At that point, Magouyrk described how OCI is designed to harness the full power and potential of AI with industry apps and horizontal apps.
“In addition to what you just heard Mike talk about re the synergies between the different applications, the same is true between our infrastructure and the applications themselves,” Magouyrk said.
“We can deploy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure all over the world and offer access to the latest and greatest AI models — whether it be Grok or whether it be Gemini, whether it be Cohere or other models like Llama — and offer those through our Gen AI service to take advantage of that inside the applications themselves.
“Then we have the Oracle Database and the world’s best database services that run on top of that compute and storage and networking infrastructure, and then you get to layer the applications on top,” Magouyrk said.
“So the whole really is more than the sum of the parts.”
Final Thought
I’ll turn it over to Larry Ellison for the last word via an excerpt from the call in which Ellison attempts to describe the unprecedented opportunity of the AI Revolution, plus Oracle’s role in that upheaval.
“But now Oracle is entering the AI era. I’ve never seen an opportunity on this scale before. The immense impact of AI across our economy is hard to grasp. The colossal size of the AI endeavor and the size of the responsibility that goes with it, it’s difficult to imagine.
“But Oracle’s job is not to imagine gigawatt-scale data centers: Oracle’s job is to build them,” Ellison said.
“Clay and Mike are proven successful leaders prepared and experienced in pursuing AI opportunities. I’m looking forward to working with Clay, Mike and Safra over the coming years to develop AI technology and enable our customers to use large language models with their private data.
“By doing that, Oracle will make it easy for all of our customers to use AI to solve their most important problems.”
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