Cloud News

WATCH: Oracle Cloud SVP Dismisses Claim That Oracle Was Late To Cloud Market

At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle touted plans to produce the market’s first autonomous cloud and Oracle Cloud SVP Steve Daheb says the industry is taking note.

Oracle presented a new cloud story at OpenWorld 2019, where CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison took on the competition with a bold promise to produce the market’s first autonomous cloud.

“Artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems are so fundamentally different from what came before, it marks a new generation in computer technology,” he said.

Ellison says Oracle Cloud is seeing the demand from a growing customer base: Oracle Cloud now has 40,000 customers. To learn more about Oracle’s cloud strategy and the impact on its partner community, CRN’s Diana Blass interviewed Steve Daheb, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud.

What do customers want out of cloud today and how can partners play a role in delivering that?

Daheb: When we look at cloud what it creates it opportunities. You have a company like Mitsubishi Electric that looked to automate 10K orders that they process a day. They improved productivity time by 55 percent while reducing costs. It’s not just about lift and shift, peace out and you’re on your own. It’s: How do I manage it? How do I secure it? Ultimately, that’s the role partners play in helping customers move to cloud and innovate in ways they couldn’t before.

How do you expect the new cloud announcements to impact Oracle Cloud’s standing in the market? Experts say Oracle trails the major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) in market share, but the new technology appears to be turning heads among those at the conference.

Daheb: I would disagree a little bit because what I would say it sometimes people tend to conflate IaaS, storage, servers, networking and compute as cloud. If you think about it: In 2011, we moved all of our applications to cloud. We introduced platform services that span autonomous database, integrations and analytics, security and application development and then we purpose built an infrastructure that support these applications, these AI capabilities and autonomous capabilities. And, I think what you’re seeing this year, you know I’ve been here for almost five years now, is that these pieces continue to get integrated.

Tell us about a successful customer outcome that your partners can learn from.

You have a small company like QMP, a small Dallas-based company that was dealing with the important problem of how you improve time for results for lab tests. Just imagine, they were able to take that from two weeks to 30 minutes using autonomous database and analytics. That means faster time to diagnosis, faster to treatment, and faster time to outcome. They used partners to help create that solution as well.

Watch more of Daheb’s interview in CRN’s video.