Here at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HQ in Seattle, we’re super excited to see this year’s Oracle OpenWorld event rapidly approaching. Each year, OpenWorld represents an opportunity to step back and take stock of what we’ve delivered, and to look ahead at what’s new and upcoming for the next year. I’m always inspired by what the hard-working people in my org have accomplished, but this year genuinely stands out. Just a few years ago, we were imagining a cloud infrastructure platform for mission-critical enterprise usage, and we were building out the prototypes of the services that would be the foundation for that usage. We’ve been working hard to enable this big vision, and as of this year, we’ve shipped all the underpinnings and now have a proven, globally distributed platform, with advanced services that go far beyond basic requirements. We’re onboarding new customers around the world in public and private sectors and in every imaginable industry for a wide variety of use cases. We’re building partnerships with leaders in the industry to host their software and interconnect our cloud with their capabilities. All this translates to solving big problems for customers at scale, and delighting them with capabilities that they can’t get anywhere else.

Year in Review

We’ve delivered so much since OpenWorld last year that I can’t call it all out in one blog post, but here are some of the highlights.

Global Expansion

At OpenWorld last year, we announced a bold plan to expand our cloud from the four regions we had at that time in the US and Europe to a worldwide operation in just one year. It was a risk to push so hard, and doing so much expansion in such a short time and without errors tested our ability to execute consistently. But we did it, staying on schedule and maintaining high quality. We already launched 12 new regions since then, and have three more to go to finish our initial regional expansion. In order to do this, we’ve focused a great deal of energy on automating our region build process. This will serve us well as we look forward to our next chapter of global expansion this coming year.

Autonomous Database

Last year on the main stage at OpenWorld, we described a vision for a fully self-driving serverless database service that takes care of tuning, securing, scaling, and managing automatically, using advanced AI technology to give better results than human admins are capable of. Autonomous is not just the evolution of Oracle Database, it’s also the spearhead for Oracle’s transition from a company that ships software to a company that delivers cloud services. Autonomous is available only as a cloud service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and it represents what we believe is the future of relational databases for enterprise usage in transactional and data warehouse scenarios. We’re excited to see customers around the world adopting this production service that runs on our cloud infrastructure and see it as just the beginning of a movement towards autonomous cloud services.

Cloud Native Application Development Services

Although the world knows Oracle well for database and enterprise applications, we also have a deep heritage in helping innovative developers build exceptional custom solutions. A year ago, we dreamed of giving enterprise app developers the tools that they need to build applications that take full advantage of the design principles enabled by cloud—scale-out, microservices architectures that react to perceived scenarios rather than coding for explicit actions. During this past year, we’ve gone from vision to reality, shipping services for Functions, Events, Notifications, Streaming, Resource Manager, and Monitoring. All of these services focus on our belief that an effective enterprise cloud for developers is built on principles of openness and flexibility. We enable third-party and open source options that developers use, and we eliminate lock-in by ensuring that everything we run can be run elsewhere, on-premises or in other clouds.

HPC Portfolio

High performance computing (HPC) has emerged as a key differentiator among innovative companies in a variety of industries. Whether for simulation to reduce time-to-market in manufacturing, or in decision modeling in the financial services arena, or in life sciences or oil and gas industries, smart companies are gaining ground on their competitors through effective use of big computing resources. Oracle has launched a unique range of HPC offerings that include the latest GPU chips, our massive bandwidth RDMA interconnect network for clustered computing, and our bare metal machines that deliver all the compute power and flexibility that demanding jobs require. We’ve shipped numerous solutions in this space and our customers are seeing great results using them.

Microsoft Partnership

In June 2019, Oracle and Microsoft announced a first-of-its-kind partnership to provide preconfigured, low-latency connectivity between Azure and Oracle Cloud in selected regions. This connectivity makes migration of on-premises workloads smooth and effortless, and makes it possible to span applications across both clouds. We’re excited to be enabling the many joint customers of Microsoft and Oracle to run the workloads of their choice, on the cloud that’s optimized for what they run, with easy exchange of data between the two, and common support and identity federation between clouds.

What Coming in OpenWorld 2019

Looking ahead to what’s coming at OpenWorld 2019, we’ve got a long list of announcements planned. While I can’t divulge too much, I can say that I’m tremendously excited for what we’re unveiling around security and core infrastructure. These updates will make it easier for Oracle Cloud customers to ensure data protection and to realize greater cloud benefits with dramatically increased flexibility. And we’re not stopping our expansion efforts. Quite the contrary, you’ll see some big news from us about expanding our cloud region footprint in the coming year. We have exciting new services launching in the cloud native space as well that will further enable innovation for our customers as they reimagine their technology deployments. We also have big partner news in a number of categories, where we’re enabling the use of some of the most important and innovative tech vendors in the industry within Oracle Cloud, with a variety of delivery models.

If you’re going to OpenWorld this year, here are some of the top sessions that I encourage you to attend, to get the latest and most in-depth coverage of all things Oracle Cloud.

Solution Keynote: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap

Join Oracle SVP Clay Magouyrk as he recaps 2018 and shares exciting announcements that make Oracle Cloud simpler to adopt and even more capable for all your existing and new enterprise workloads. We’ll cover our growing ecosystem and regions, our data management and cloud native pillars, and unveil first-of-its kind cloud infrastructure and security capabilities. Key customers and partners will share their successes and best practices with Oracle Cloud. Whether you’re a deep cloud user or just getting started, join us to inform and accelerate your cloud strategy.

Oracle Cloud: A Path and a Platform

Cloud technologies are beginning to reshape how we think about and interact with the world around us. The opportunities that the cloud presents are real and present today, and they are providing the building blocks for companies to pioneer groundbreaking innovations and disrupt entire industries. Today, we’re seeing emerging technologies and automation permeate every aspect of work and life. The real opportunity of these technologies—which include AI, machine learning, IoT, blockchain, containers and serverless, and human interfaces—is to embrace them on a scale that we never have before. Join Oracle SVP Steve Daheb as he talks with some of our most exciting customers about their key business drivers and what they’re building.

Go Serverless: Introducing Oracle Functions

Serverless platforms continue to attract users because of the advantages they offer for developer productivity, application scalability, and cost savings. And with the introduction of Oracle Functions, developers are now able to incorporate serverless compute as part of their cloud native applications. Built on the open source Fn project, Oracle Functions provides the advantages of a vendor-neutral platform with the ability to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s powerful cloud native services. In this session, discover the Oracle Functions platform, see its features and benefits, and learn how to build serverless applications that free developers to focus on delivering business value and not on managing infrastructure.

Cloud Native Application Development with Events, Functions, and Notifications

Enterprises are increasingly transforming to cloud native applications to fully harness the capabilities of the cloud. In this session, we walk through two scenarios where cloud native applications are most common: using the Events service with Oracle Functions to build a cloud native events-driven application, and using the Events service with Notifications service to send notifications about mission-critical operations.

Build Next-Gen Apps Powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database

Explore how you can build next-gen enterprise applications, powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database. This session highlights some of the key business drivers and challenges driving the development of next-gen enterprise apps. Dive deep into various tools and solutions available to build enterprise-ready cloud applications. Learn some of the architecture patterns and best practices for building, deploying, and running next-gen enterprise workloads in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Oracle Autonomous Database.

Mission-Critical Workloads Are Moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: This Is Why

The combination of eye-opening price performance, flexible payment options, and migration assistance has led to companies saving costs, creating new products and revenue streams, and trusting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run their mission-critical workloads. In this session, Oracle customers share their real-world journeys and how they are benefiting from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Seattle’s Newest Power Couple

Microsoft and Oracle recently announced a cloud interoperability partnership that enables customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. You may be asking yourself, “Will I get more out of my current investment in Microsoft and Oracle? Will this allow me to migrate more of my mission-critical applications to the cloud? Will I be able to use this new capability to connect applications in Azure to Oracle Autonomous Database?” Spoiler alert: the answer is YES. In this session, join the product experts from Microsoft and Oracle responsible for this unprecedented partnership and learn how you can elevate your multicloud strategy.

See you in San Francisco! If you can’t make it, we’ll have plenty of online and regional events to keep you up-to-date on everything we’re doing.

Best regards,

Vinay Kumar, VP Product Management, Oracle Cloud