Oracle CloudWorld Day 1: From Safra Catz to Larry Ellison
Oracle customers and partners convened in Las Vegas for the first time in two years. See what happened.
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Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, took the keynote stage on Oct. 18, three years after the last in-person CloudWorld. It was hard to miss her joy at being back live with thousands of attendees. Here are some of her thoughts.
“What we learned during COVID is that it is absolutely critical to have a digital connection with your employees, with your customers, with your suppliers and with your partners.”
“Being bold is the way to win. … Being timid could wipe you out.”
To customers: “Your success is absolutely central to everything we do.”
Nvidia and Oracle are expanding their partnership. While the effects of that are more of a trickle-down proposition for managed service providers and other Oracle channel partners, it is of interest given the focus on artificial intelligence. Here are some outtakes from Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s conversation with Oracle CEO Catz during the Oct. 18 keynote.
“These are incredible times.”
“We’re seeing the slowdown of traditional compute scaling limited by physics. This is making it more difficult for customers, all of us, to do our computing at an ever decreasing cost … so that we can do more.”
“The writing’s on the wall, the trends are clear … that all workloads are going to be accelerated.”
“I think the next 10 years are going to be some of the most exciting times for our industry.”
Oracle CloudWorld attendees filled the Venetian Convention & Expo Center to hear CEO Safra Catz. Catz conducted several conversations with prime Oracle Cloud customers.
Deutsche Bank stands out as one of the world’s most recognizable financial services brands. Catz and Gordon Mackechnie, CTO of the global bank, took part in a short conversation about the challenges Deutsche Bank, a key Oracle customer, is facing.
“Demand for technology increases all the time in banking.”
“Risk management is getting more sophisticated.”
“If we innovate the right way, we can be even more secure.”
Catz and Raul Obregon, CTO and chief transformation officer of Grupo Bimbo, talked about the big barriers the food production industry is up against these days. Obregon cited energy and commodities prices, as well as talent shortages — all hallmarks of an emerging recession.
Catz remained optimistic.
“Even in downturns there are incredible opportunities,” Catz said. “The strong have opportunities.”
Johnson Controls, a 137-year-old company, employs more than 100,000 people throughout 40 countries. Its challenge has been to stay ahead of the competition in building management. CIO Diane Schwarz said Johnson Controls achieves that by thinking digital-first — and that has taken a whole transformation process.
And that transformation, Catz interjected, “is not for the faint of heart.”
Schwarz agreed.
“If you haven’t started, you’re already too late,” she said.
Catz agreed.
“The time to start is now. … Moving slowly is very dangerous.”
Schwarz left attendees with this advice, which channel partners can surely use: “Tie everything to business strategy,” she said, adding, “Don’t do it alone.”
Oracle Red Bull Racing’s team principal and CEO took the stage last with Catz. Christian Horner came to talk about how the Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team — which Oracle started sponsoring earlier this year — is using Oracle technologies for racer simulations and a new engine, set to debut in 2026.
“As soon as we put the [Oracle] logo on the car, we started winning,” Horner told the audience.
The team is relying on Oracle’s analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and, overall, cloud infrastructure, to take first place as much as it can.
“Boldness does win the game — being different, not following what everybody else is doing,” Catz said.
Not surprisingly, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure took up a significant portion of the CloudWorld show floor.
Everybody needs a time out at these giant industry events. Oracle provided a lounge and a DJ for people who just needed a short break between sessions and keynotes.
Larry Ellison envisions a world where multicloud infrastructure is open and clouds connect easily to one another.
“It’s an internet of clouds, if you will,” he said. “We think that’s where the world is going.”
Oracle and Microsoft Azure already have that capability — they announced it this past summer. But that’s just the beginning, if Ellison has his way.
“Taking a service and making it available on multiple clouds — that’s better than nothing,” Ellison said. “But a bigger idea would be, why don’t we just interconnect the clouds themselves?”
Ultimately, Ellison sees that happening. It’s just a question of when.
Recall that Oracle bought electronic health records vendor Cerner late last year. Turns out, that $28.3 billion deal is about far more than serving hospital systems.
Get this: Ellison envisions Oracle creating a national U.S. public health electronic record database — one that will eventually go global.
“It was clear during the COVID-19 pandemic that we are in desperate, desperate need of both of those systems,” Ellison said.
Along the way, Ellison plans for Oracle to also build a patient engagement platform so medical professionals and patients can easily communicate.
All in all, Ellison said, “What we are trying to do has never been attempted before.”
Ellison gave no timeline for the ambitious projects, which, he added, “can’t ever go down,” nor can it lose data. To achieve those goals, Ellison says Oracle will work with partners — which, in this case, are largely hospitals, researchers, universities and AI specialists — to develop the national and global systems.
In the meantime, Ellison says the Oracle-Cerner merger will help lead to a more efficient way of providing health care to everybody.
“Together we’re going to modernize their systems and provide better information than we currently have,” he said.
Plus, Ellison added, “We’re really straining the budgets of our western democracies. We’ve got to do a better job.”
Ellison believes a global electronic records system is possible. Consider that such a system already exists.
“We built a fabulous local systems for credit,” Ellison said. “There is a global financial database that keeps track of every credit-worthy person on the face of the earth. Think about that.”
In essence, Ellison said that if global leaders can achieve that kind of thoroughness for money, it can also be done for health care records.
“Obviously we prioritize shopping way above health care,” he said. “Shopping’s important, health is not. I don’t think that’s right.”
Coming back to the issue of privacy, Ellison addressed that pressing issue once more by citing the CDC’s V-safe repository.
“If all your records are in one place, we can make sure that place is locked,” he said.
In other words, only the patient gets the key to those records and chooses with whom to share it.
In addition, Ellison said public health officials only see anonymized data with V-safe, and that would be the same when it comes to global electronic health records database. Right now, they also can view new variants for diseases such as COVID-19.
“We caught [COVID-19] way too late,” he noted. “We need to catch it earlier next time. … That’s why we need these global systems so we find them and try to keep [new diseases] isolated.”
Ellison believes a global electronic records system is possible. Consider that such a system already exists.
“We built a fabulous local systems for credit,” Ellison said. “There is a global financial database that keeps track of every credit-worthy person on the face of the earth. Think about that.”
In essence, Ellison said that if global leaders can achieve that kind of thoroughness for money, it can also be done for health care records.
“Obviously we prioritize shopping way above health care,” he said. “Shopping’s important, health is not. I don’t think that’s right.”
Coming back to the issue of privacy, Ellison addressed that pressing issue once more by citing the CDC’s V-safe repository.
“If all your records are in one place, we can make sure that place is locked,” he said.
In other words, only the patient gets the key to those records and chooses with whom to share it.
In addition, Ellison said public health officials only see anonymized data with V-safe, and that would be the same when it comes to global electronic health records database. Right now, they also can view new variants for diseases such as COVID-19.
“We caught [COVID-19] way too late,” he noted. “We need to catch it earlier next time. … That’s why we need these global systems so we find them and try to keep [new diseases] isolated.”
ORACLE CLOUDWORLD — It’s almost as though COVID-19 never happened. On Tuesday, thousands of people converged on the Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas for Oracle’s much-anticipated cloud event.
The day started with a series of keynote conversations between CEO Safra Catz and a range of key Oracle customers. Each discussed how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is changing and elevating how they do business. (We deliver the specifics in the slideshow above.)
Along the way, we took some miscellaneous photos of the activity happening outside of the keynote room. People could lounge while a DJ played music, or they could attend sessions, or they could get lunch on the CloudWorld show floor and check out the many, various booths.
Then, the first afternoon of Oracle CloudWorld wrapped up with a keynote speech from Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison. Hint: Ellison has an extremely big vision for Oracle and Cerner, and, frankly, the whole world’s health care systems.
“What we are trying to do has never been attempted before,” he said.
(He also talked a little bit about multicloud interconnectivity — we cover that, too.)
See our slideshow above for a roundup of Oracle CloudWorld’s first day back after a two-year break.
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