Oracle’s New Cloud Services: A New Big Push for Automation

With a recent announcement Oracle, the global software and hardware powerhouse follows on its continuing effort to equipe all the solutions from its Cloud Platform with autonomous capabilities.

As part of a venture that started early this year with the announcement of the first set of autonomous services —including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service— and the announcement of Oracle 18c to be Oracle’s first fully autonomous database— the company is now extending these capabilities with the launch of another set of services in the cloud.

This time the turn is for three new services: Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud which, according to Oracle, will be followed by the release of more autonomous services later through the year and which will be focused on mobile, chatbots, data integration, blockchain, security and management,  as well as more traditional database workloads including OLTP.

Built from the ground-up with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, Oracle’s Cloud Platform new autonomous set of services aims, according to Oracle, to automate and/or eliminate tasks so organizations can lower costs, reduce risks and accelerate innovation while also gain predictive insights.

In this regard Amit Zavery, executive vice president of development from Oracle Cloud Platform mentioned:

“Embedding AI and machine learning in these cloud services will help organizations innovate in revolutionary new ways. These new cloud services are the latest in a series of steps from Oracle to incorporate industry-first autonomous capabilities that will enable customers to significantly reduce operational costs, increase productivity, and decrease risk.”

Oracle´s new and existing autonomous services within Oracle Cloud Platform services all follow the companies guidelines and fundamental autonomous capabilities, which can be summarized as:

• Self-Driving capabilities that can reduce/eliminate human labor throughout all processes: provisioning, securing, monitoring, storing and copying and troubleshooting.
• Self-Securing capabilities to secure services from external attacks and malicious internal users, this includes automatically application of security updates, protection against cyberattacks as well as automatically encrypt all data.
• Self-Repairing capabilities for providing automated protection against planned and unplanned downtime, including maintenance.

The new autonomous services announced by Oracle are planned to impact different functional aspects of an organization’s necessary enterprise software services, from analytics to software development, a brief description of these new services include:

Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud

This service assembles a combination of technologies including machine learning, adaptive intelligence, and service automation within an analytics platform aiming to change the way users  analyze, understand, and act on information.

Oracle’s Autonomous Analytics Cloud service includes also functionality to enable business users to uncover insights by asking questions on their mobile devices. Natural language processing techniques convert questions into queries in the back end to processed so the system can deliver visualizations on their device.

The service’s machine learning functionality can autonomously gain intelligence and proactively suggest insight on data the user might not even have asked for or reveal hidden patterns.

The service is designed so can provide predictive analytics on IoT functionality data by applying domain specific machine learning algorithms on large volumes of sensor data and historical patterns.

Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud

This service aims to speed an organization’s complex application integration process via automation.

Business processes that expand both Oracle and non-Oracle applications sitting over on-premises and SaaS applications can be embedded and integrated through a best-practice guided autonomous application integration process using machine-learning and pre-built application integration techniques.

The Autonomous Integration Cloud Service delivers an adaptive case management system through APIs with AI and machine learning frameworks which enables also Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to deliver process automation to systems with no APIs enabled.

Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud

Oracle’s Autonomous Visual Builder is designed to help companies accelerate their mobile and web application development cycles by providing business users and developers a framework to build applications with no coding.

By using the latest industry-standard technologies, the service automates code generation and allowing its deployment with a single click.

Aside from enabling rapid application development the service also automates the delivery of mobile applications across multiple mobile platforms including iOS and Android as well as availability to development on standard open-source technologies including Oracle JET and  Swagger.

So what?

Well, with a set of significant and continuous moves to achieve automation, Oracle aims to gain significant leading edge across the software industry which has become increasingly competitive.

Oracle is making clear it will extend autonomous capabilities throughout its entire Cloud Platform, committed to provide self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities to all its PaaS services. Yet, in my view, even with all the potential advantages these movements might bring to the company is taking not a small risk, one perhaps comparable with IBM and Watson which for some time seemed to be launched in a time where most users were not ready for all the goodness the AI system could provide them with.

This been said, it's still hard of course not to be excited about Oracle’s new promise for a new generation of fully autonomous software, able to achieve many of the end objectives for what expert systems and artificial intelligence visionaries have dreamed for.

In the meantime, I hardly can wait to know what will be the response in the market both from users and of course, from Oracle’s competitors, if any, to these new release from Oracle.