Oracle’s AI Strategy Now Spanning Apps, Services, Infrastructure

Oracle is going all in artificial intelligence (AI), revealing it is now embedding AI capabilities throughout its portfolio.

“We believe that Oracle has the most constantly comprehensive AI strategy, from apps and AI services to data and infrastructure,” said Jason Rees, SVP technology engineering, Oracle EMEA.

Rees said that Oracle has been delivering “classic AI” in the form of machine learning, pattern recognition and automation to customers for years. Now however, generative AI (gen AI) is changing the game.

“If you don’t have good data, then the outcomes are not going to be as favorable,” he explained at a recent roundtable in London. “We have taken an approach to embed AI capabilities throughout our portfolio.”

Oracle AI Across Infrastructure, Services And Applications

On infrastructure he said: “The way we have architected the OCI (Oracle Cloud infrastructure) means that the network fabric of our cloud and from an AI point of view allows us to be able to get that massive scale.”

The exec cited Oracle’s relationship with Nvidia, enabling Oracle to create superclusters across OCI that can scale up to that 32,000 GPU. He also pointed to Oracle’s bare metal and RDMA [remote direct memory access] offerings for scale, alongside non-blocking networks.

“On the infrastructure is we can scale hugely. Customers can run can train their large language models on our infrastructure,” said Rees, adding that OpenAI are running part their inference on OCI.

On AI services, Rees pointed to the release of Oracle Database 23ai.

Oracle's Jason Rees

“It isn’t just an upgrade of the database,” said Rees. “It adds huge new features, one of those being Vector Search.”

Rees also highlighted Oracle’s relationship with Cohere, which it offers as a managed service. The gen AI service allows enterprises to integrate LLM-based generative AI interfaces in their applications via an API.

Finally, Rees said that Oracle will continue to embed AI into its application suite, including Oracle NetSuite. The ERP software’s 38,000 customers are seeing a huge amount of potential around gen AI, said James Chisham, VP product management, Oracle NetSuite.

NetSuite AI Built In Not Bolted On

In 2023, NetSuite released a raft of updates that feature both traditional and generative AI-powered capabilities. The vendor wants to leverage AI more — but it's important that it is built in to every new feature, not bolted on, said Chisham.

“It’s not just about, having a chatbot in the software. What we really want to do is have it within the fabric of what NetSuite does,” he said. “We’re evaluating AI solutions and different use cases. We want to have it in a business process that the customer is using so [it] reveals itself as you’re using the software. We don’t really want an experience where we’re jumping out into something else; it has to be within in our software.

“We’re not going to charge for it,” he added. “It’s just part of what NetSuite does. That’s going to be really great for our users, particularly in that SMB space that we operate in. We want AI for all.”

Partners to Play a 'Big Role' In Delivering AI

Last year Oracle revealed a strategic change from a product-led partner strategy to focusing on solutions and outcomes.

Rees told Channel Futures that Oracle is working with global system integrators (GSI) on delivering AI to enterprise customers.

“People are looking for advice and guidance and inspiration. They are bound to go toward the most bigger GSIs who have they have those strategic advisory relationships with," he said. “Those channel partners are the ones who actually are going and talk to clients … They’re working a lot of industry use cases so we collaborate a lot with those large GSIs. Certainly in our part of the business that inspires not just the customers to do stuff but obviously inspires us as well to say, ‘How could we take those examples and use our technology?’ We do continue to work very closely with channel partners as we all discover what these new use cases look like.”

Chisham added that SMB-focused NetSuite has “a rich ecosystem of channel partners.”

Oracle NetSuite's James Chisham

“We fully expect our partners to play a big role in us delivering AI to our customers,” he said. “Where we’ll be leveraging the platform more, we will be opening up some of those capabilities to our partners to help us. We see this benefit for all. We don’t always have the perfect answer for everybody in every industry and every part of where they operate. So we see our channel partners will be a growing element of what we do in this space.”