Oracle Cloud Platform Launches to Accelerate Enterprise IT Move to the Cloud; Intelligent App announced

Oracle today announced a series of major innovations across the Oracle Cloud Platform that are designed to give organizations the confidence they need to run their most critical applications in the Cloud. At the heart of Oracle’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is Oracle’s new Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) based on Oracle Database 12c Release 2. Oracle’s new database is being made available in the Cloud first, providing businesses of all sizes with access to the world’s fastest, most scalable and reliable database technology in a cost-effective and flexible Cloud environment.

For nearly 40 years, more than 300,000 customers have trusted Oracle database technology to run database applications. Today, Oracle is bringing that speed, scale and reliability to the Cloud with a new DBaaS offering. Oracle Database 12c Release 2 is fully compatible from entry-level to the largest database workloads and enables businesses to take advantage of on-premise-grade capabilities to run database development, small to mid-sized business and departmental applications, as well as enterprise applications in the Cloud.

Oracle today also unveiled new enhancements and Oracle Cloud Platform offerings including comprehensive tools for all application development models. This includes simplified migration and extension of enterprise workloads in the Cloud, tools for Cloud native, and low-code development. PaaS enhancements unveiled today also include nineteen new Cloud services including: Container Cloud Service, Oracle Identity Cloud Service, Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service, Big Data Cloud Services and Oracle Analytics Cloud Services.

Today’s announcements by Oracle come at a time when many organizations have found themselves wanting to leverage the cost and simplicity of the Cloud but have yet to make the move. Concerns about security, scale and complexity, uncertain migration paths, fragmented toolsets, and inconsistent user experiences have left many businesses sitting on the sidelines in search of a Cloud offering with the on-premise-grade capabilities enterprise IT requires. With today’s announcements, Oracle is delivering the end-to-end capabilities enterprises need to take full advantage of the Cloud.

“Oracle Cloud Platform enables developers, IT, and line of business leaders to easily leverage the Cloud for any workload,” said Thomas Kurian, president of Oracle product development. “Oracle Cloud Platform offers an integrated offering across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, because that’s what the enterprise customer demands. Oracle makes it easy to run our open standards based Platform as a Service in the public cloud with high performance and availability.”

Next Generation Database-as-a-Service

Today’s release of Oracle’s world’s number one database, Oracle Database 12c Release 2, coming first in the Cloud, marks a new era of magnitude and innovation for the enterprise. Building on its unique multi-tenant architecture and in-memory technology, Oracle’s flagship database is poised to exceed today’s requirements and future-proof enterprise against the exponential data sprawl of tomorrow with faster analytics workloads and unrivalled support for database magnitudes up to hundreds of terabytes.

Oracle Database will also help reinvent productivity for DevOps while bolstering security by enabling rapid setup and teardown of new databases as well as advanced configuration to combine the world-class performance of Oracle Exadata engineered systems with Oracle’s unique pluggable database technology. This next-generation standard of performance is now available as an entry-level solution for small to medium sized databases in production, development and testing – starting at just $175 per month with Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service.

For enterprises to build on top of the world’s number one database, Oracle today released a range of new PaaS services that make it easier to develop, move, manage and connect in the Cloud.

New Approaches for Cloud Application Developers

With Oracle PaaS, developers have more choice than ever to develop on-premise or in the Cloud, using a variety of languages and services. Oracle’s Application Container Cloud Service now includes support for PHP, along with Node.js and Java.  Applications composed from multiple PaaS services can be created, scaled and managed as a single unit with the new Oracle Cloud Stack Manager. In addition, enterprises can migrate Java EE apps to the Cloud automatically using Oracle AppToCloud while adding capabilities like active standby and increasing cluster size as the application is moved to the Cloud. Anyone can author complete applications from a browser without coding skills, using the Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service low-code development platform to extend services with pre-populated Oracle Software-as-a-Service APIs or custom services from a common REST API catalog.

Oracle Developer Cloud Service also makes collaboration between developers easier by integrating with popular collaboration tools like Slack, Hipchat, Hashicorp’s Packer and Terraform and including agile management features for managing sprints, tasks and backlogs.

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service now provides actionable insights and engagement across multi-channels and micro locations to improve the customer experience. It also provides an intelligent and contextual Chatbots experience across multiple messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik and others.

Proactive Cloud Security with Identity and Analytics

Oracle Identity Cloud Service is a new Cloud-native security and identity platform that quickly integrates with Cloud applications using open standards and allows user identities to be managed across Cloud and on-premise deployments.

Security is further enhanced with the new Oracle Security Monitoring and Analytics Cloud Service in the new Oracle Management Cloud that uses machine learning to help identify threats and provide early warnings. Oracle Management Cloud is the first fully integrated tool to manage the lifecycle of enterprise applications. It uses machine learning to monitor and analyze end-to-end operational data across heterogeneous environments, detect anomalies and help ensure performance and compliance.

Simplifying Application and Data Integration across Multiple Clouds and On-Premise

Developers can use Oracle API Platform Cloud Service to create, secure and manage their APIs with zero code and pre-built analytics charts, while being able to run the API gateway within the Oracle Cloud, on-premise or on third party clouds. Zero-code orchestration for Cloud to on-premise integration is also now available with Oracle Integration Cloud Service which includes more than fifty pre-built adapters for apps including Ariba, Concur, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Slack, Twilio, Twitter and more.

Oracle’s Data Integration Cloud Service offers streaming replication and extract, transform and load capabilities for a variety of use cases including data migration and to support data warehouse style workloads that move data across PaaS, including Oracle Database as a service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, and even non-Oracle DBaaS. Oracle Data Integration Cloud includes a unified design environment for developing MapReduce transformations, transforming structured data and developing Hive-based transformations, all in a single utility. Oracle delivers an industry first in its ability to replicate data in near real-time or in batches from on-premise to the Cloud or from one Cloud to another.

Using Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service, customers can deploy out-of-the-box IoT applications such as Asset Monitoring, Production Monitoring, Fleet Monitoring or Connected Worker. The IoT Cloud service delivers simplified connectivity through device virtualization, streaming and predictive analytics. This combines in-motion data collected from devices, at-rest contextual data residing in the ERP and CRM applications and pre-existing integrations with business applications like Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s JD Edwards and Oracle’s PeopleSoft.

Big Data and Analytics Unleashed in the Cloud

Oracle Big Data Cloud Services adds many new services and capabilities including support for Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and NoSQL technology. Oracle Big Data Cloud Service Compute Edition is a fully managed, elastic service, providing a platform for big data management and analytics. Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service is a fully managed, elastic service that supports the loading, processing and analysis of streaming data and the development and deployment of streaming applications. Oracle DataFlow ML Cloud Service supports streaming and batch data movement and transformations, with machine learning recommendations for mapping, profiling, and enriching big data. Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service delivers predictable high performance for the most demanding NoSQL applications. Finally, Oracle Big Data SQL Cloud Service offers one fast SQL query on all big data stored in Hadoop, multiple NoSQL databases and Oracle Database.

Oracle Analytics Cloud lets enterprise empower anyone to ask any question of any data using any device, in the Cloud, on-premise, or both. This includes Oracle Essbase Cloud Service, a new Cloud solution that enables enterprises to transform unreliable spreadsheet-based processes into streamlined collaborative models in minutes. Adding to rich visualization and self-service discovery capabilities, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service now interprets data to automatically create smart insights and make business more productive. It includes smart data connectors to more than 40 sources, self-service data preparation and packaged analytic applications for sales, marketing, human resources and finance.

Oracle’s Next Generation Cloud Strategy: Intelligent Applications

Building on its position as the industry’s leading Cloud Applications provider, Oracle today unveiled its strategy for next generation Software as a Service (SaaS) Cloud offerings that blend third-party data with real-time analytics and behavioral inputs to create Cloud Applications that adapt and learn. The result: intelligent Cloud Applications that automatically offer individualized recommended actions and streamline the tasks of business users such as human resource or finance professionals.

Called Adaptive Intelligent Applications, these next generation Cloud offerings are based on the insights contained within Oracle’s Data Cloud, which is a collection of more than 5+ billion consumer and business profiles, with over 45,000 attributes. When activated, these new Adaptive Intelligent Applications use Oracle’s web-scale data and apply advanced data science to learn and ingest data about an organization’s users and their behaviors to deliver targeted information to customers and employees. The insights from these deep analytics build a knowledge base that helps improve business results across organizations.

R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research said: “There is a huge opportunity to monetize digital business through machine learning applications and analytics, and Oracle’s large corpus of data, strong expertise in data science, massive compute power, industry and domain expertise, and breadth of application solutions make it well-suited to be a leader in the quickly growing space.”

“A company’s data is its most valuable weapon. To remain competitive today, companies must access their information in real time to intelligently forecast and grow,” said Steve Miranda, Oracle’s executive vice president of applications development. “Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications leverage anonymized information from our extensive Data Cloud to optimize existing Cloud Application functionality. When this is combined with a company’s own data, we are able to provide unparalleled customized insights to help enhance business performance.

Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications have direct benefits for functional business units, providing them with actionable business and customer insights to make more informed decisions:

• Finance professionals can nimbly negotiate best supplier terms, while optimizing cash flow needs and balancing costs – especially during critical financial events such as the end of a quarter or for a high volume of payables.
• Human Resources recruiters can automatically identify best-fit candidates in the shortest time and HR managers can create job descriptions that will help candidates more efficiently find the best and most well-suited positions.
• Marketing and Commerce managers can drive higher conversion rates, lift, repeat purchases, and ultimately, revenue, with smart, contextual offers and recommended actions for individual consumers.
• Supply Chain managers can automatically find the best options to distribute goods around the world, while optimizing costs and price for both the buyers and the transporters to provide the best value freight and transportation options for enterprise shippers.

“Within the foreseeable future, every enterprise application will be a smart application that intuitively learns from interactions with an enterprise’s data. Oracle’s new Adaptive Intelligent solutions take this value proposition a step further. They are set apart from others by allowing the intelligent applications to learn from billions of anonymized consumer and business profiles available from Oracle.” said Dave Schubmehl, research director of cognitive systems and content analytics for IDC.

Building on its industry-leading suite of Cloud Applications, Oracle further expanded its SaaS portfolio with additional new Cloud Applications and enhancements that span sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and other areas of business. Some of the new offerings include:

• Oracle Engagement Cloud, part of Oracle’s Customer Experience Cloud portfolio, is a new offering, which combines Oracle’s sales and service capabilities in one, providing a unique combination of sales automation, service request management, knowledge management, and customer self-service. Oracle Engagement Cloud enables organizations’ employees to deliver both sales and customer services from a single screen, powering a one-stop customer experience. Oracle Engagement Cloud helps improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, while increasing up-sell opportunities, particularly for organizations providing high-touch and high value customer engagements, such as wealth managers, enterprise sales reps, or managers who need access to service request in industries such as financial services, high tech and industrial manufacturing, consumer goods, and communications.

• Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCCS) Cloud, part of Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management Cloud portfolio, enables Chief Financial Officers at organizations of all sizes to minimize risk, provide transparency, and ensure accurate results of the close. Able to rapidly deploy in weeks, Oracle FCCS provides CFOs the operational agility they need to effectively communicate their financial results to internal and external stakeholders, to quickly consolidate the operating results of an acquired business to help ensure compliance, and to scale globally without a need to re-implement core financial processes or systems.

• Oracle Revenue Management Cloud, part of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, increases visibility into the status and value of contracts, delivers compliant revenue recognition, and creates configurable and auditable revenue entries. The solution allows companies to adhere to the ASC 606/IFRS 15 core principles, accelerating the transition to the new accounting standards. Oracle ERP Cloud’s new enhancements deliver new support to Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their organizations with revenue recognition standards and multi-period accounting capabilities. Driving efficiencies and controls, Oracle ERP Cloud also enables organizations to scale globally with multi-language, multi-GAAP, multi-currency, and localization extensions that can transform finance organizations. As the most complete, modern, and proven ERP Cloud solution, Oracle ERP Cloud’s rapidly expanding customer base includes strong momentum in the public sector and with state and local governments.

• Oracle Student Cloud’s new Oracle CX for Higher Education uses Oracle’s intuitive mobile technology to help recruiters boost their pipeline by targeting and qualifying best-fit prospects via social, email, and SMS CRM capabilities. Oracle Student Recruiting Cloud’s embedded analytics also help improve forecasting and monitor and optimize recruiters’ performance in their territories. Student Management Cloud is Oracle’s first application of student information systems (SIS) in the Cloud. It provides a student management roadmap and the foundation for nontraditional university functionality in a comprehensive, next-generation SIS that supports changing academic models by managing flexible academic structures, personalized learning, just-in-time intelligence, and BYOD access.

• Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud’s latest release provides healthcare solutions to manage complex labor rules and contractual terms that enable customers to define eligibility rules for core Human Resources and criteria for benefits, absence, time, and labor and payroll. Oracle also helps provide an added layer of auditing, which can be easily managed in the Cloud. Additional global and industry extensions for higher education, retail, manufacturing, public sector, and professional services, also make it easier for multinational organizations to deploy and configure the solutions with expanded localizations for 99 countries.

• Oracle Internet of Things Cloud collects data and conducts analysis in real time. Line of business users, such as Manufacturing Plant Managers, can monitor real-time quality control, get early insights into predictive maintenance needs, improve worker and equipment safety, and optimize yield through Oracle’s IoT Cloud Applications.

• Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud updates enable increased flexibility, reduced costs, and improved performance and visibility across the business. This comprehensive foundation allows forward-thinking organizations to optimize their global supply chains from ideation to design, to order capture, to manufacturing and planning, to shipping and logistics. Leverages the additional insights available through capabilities such as the Internet of Things and Oracle Data Cloud, Oracle offers the Intelligent Supply Chain.

 About Oracle

Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit oracle.com.

About Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld, the industry’s most important business and technology conference for the past 20 years, hosts tens of thousands of in-person attendees as well as millions online. Dedicated to helping businesses leverage Cloud for their innovation and growth, the conference delivers deep insight into industry trends and breakthroughs driven by technology. Designed for attendees who want to connect, learn, explore and be inspired, Oracle OpenWorld offers more than 2,200 educational sessions led by more than 2,000 customers and partners sharing their experiences, first hand. With hundreds of demos and hands-on labs, plus exhibitions from more than 400 partners and customers from around the world, Oracle OpenWorld has become a showcase for leading cloud technologies, from Cloud Applications to Cloud Platform and Infrastructure. Oracle OpenWorld 2016 is being held September 18 – September 22 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information; to register; or to watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions, and more, visit www.oracle.com/openworld. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on Twitter.

 About JavaOne

The JavaOne conference brings together Java experts and enthusiasts for an extraordinary week of learning and networking focused entirely on all things Java. With more than 440 sessions covering topics that span the breadth of the Java universe, keynotes from foremost Java visionaries, tutorials, and expert-led hands-on learning opportunities, JavaOne is the world’s most important event for the Java community. Join the JavaOne discussion on Twitter.