If you missed my day 2, you can view it here.

Keynote: Customers Winning with the Cloud and AI

Today was the first proper day of the conference with keynotes and sessions. I headed over to the Venetian nice and early, had my breakfast and went to the keynote in hall A.

The hall was rapidly filling up as it was time for keynote to start and Safra Catz the CEO of Oracle to make her entrance.

She mentioned:

• How OCI is built different
• With performance and security at the heart of it
• Open to everyone, in Azure, GCP and now AWS
• Full Stack infused best technologies
• She thanks her employees, partners and the audience

She then welcomed Bill Hornbuckle, Chief Executive Officer and President at MGM Resorts International to the stage.

Safra asked, “How do you stay ahead?”

Bill talked about:

• The digital experience, use of virtual check-in used by 48% of guest
• Less expensive and quicker check-in
• They use Oracle Fusion since 2020, which reduced their labour by 25-30%
• They recieve 15-20k calls a day, and successfully moving 20% of the load to AI digital assistants
• Interesting fact of 50% of their gambling custom comes from 1% of their customers!
• The use of AI to tailor the experience for their customers

She next welcomed La’Naia Jones, Chief Information Officer at Central Intelligence Agency to the stage, who probably had the best trainers on stage 😋

La’Naia talked about:

• Thanking Oracle for the partnership and the shared mission to keep the nation safe using the best technologies.
• How CIA is all Oracle.
• How she used to be an Oracle DBA.
• Innovation, disruptive technology, opportunities to bring best solutions to make best decisions without compromise.
• Shift to cybersecurity focus, using data with GenAI to help what they do.

Safra said, Oracle don’t consider anything GA, if it can’t be available in a classified disconnected manner required for the CIA, as they are one of it’s critical customers.

Next she welcomed both Bernard Gavgani, Group CIO and member of Group Executive Committee and Jean-Yves Fillion Vice-Chairman Board of Directors at BNP Paribas to the stage.

Safra, Bernard and Jean-Yves talked about how:

• The expansion of the partnership, by BNP Paribas going to the Oracle Cloud.
• They are in 80 countries with 60 currencies.
• The relationship is not vendor and customer, it’s a true partnership.
• Is part of BNP Paribas success.
• Oracle is success when customers are successful.
• They use AI to help prevent cyberattacks.
• Security is top priority for their customers.

Next Safra welcomed Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer at Cloudflare to the stage.

Michelle blow me away, with how kickass she came across, she a co-founder and really knows her tech! 🤓

She explained:

• They have 157B cyberattacks a day!
• That’s 100M just in time she came to stage! 😲
• All protected automatically without any human intervention!
• Safra said “When a deep technology company choose Oracle, it makes Oracle proud”
• Why did they choice OCI, because it built for performance and security posture.
• Nimble and agile.
• OCI is out there, doing so much!
• Priced for performance yet efficient.
• How they need to ensure it fast and snappy and OCI gives that!
• “Focus on customer and partnership”, says Safra.

Finally, Safra welcomed Antonio Büchi Buc, CEO at Entel to the stage.

Antonio talked about how they:

• Increased revenue by going to Oracle Cloud, increased the user experience, increased NPS.
• Used AI, to predict network quality and performance.
• Taking advantage of what available to get ahead of the market.

Oracle Database Directions

After the keynote I headed to Andy Mendelsohn, Executive Vice President of Oracle Database Server Technologies.

He talked about converged Oracle database, Oracle Autonomous database and talked about the new Multicloud of Oracle Database at AWS, which Andy had alluded at his same session 2 years ago at Oracle CloudWorld 22!

He mentioned how Oracle is going back to core DNA, of we will run our database software anywhere! He explained how C-level make cloud decisions without speaking to the techies, then make a deal with a cloud provider, then tell the techies to use the credits but there no Oracle! ☹️ Now with the partnership, you can use Oracle at public cloud provider and use their credits! 😃

He finished off talking about the new ‘Select AI’ allowing you to query your data in natural language query and ‘AI Vector Search’ allowing for optimised searching of documents, images, patterns and data that have similar semantics.

Keynote: Oracle Vision and Strategy

Next I attended Larry Ellison, the chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle keynote.

He explained how customers use Multiple Clouds and Multiple Applications, but some customers want to move Oracle Exadata Databases and Applications to AWS, use Oracle Exadata Database Services inside AWS.

MultiCloud interconnect makes that possible, but not easy to use and not fast to run.

Thus the announcement of embedding Oracle Datacentres inside AWS, give highest performance, easy of use and fault-tolerant & scalability. Oracle Exadata Database runs inside AWS, going live in December 2024 in Phoenix.

Next Larry welcomed Matt Garman, CEO at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the stage, which many years ago would been unheard of.

Larry briefly discussed the partnership, “how competitors are now partners”, bringing the best in class to the customer. Then he welcomed Andrew Zitney, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer at State Street to join them on stage.

Andy explained:

• How they are a Big Oracle Exadata customer, but also a big AWS customer
• So Oracle Database@AWS is perfect for them and they very excited to use!
• This will mitigate latency issue, put the data where it’s needed.
• A 2 straw partnership with Oracle and AWS.
• Plan to go live in Virginia first.
• They are in 43 locations, looking to scale back to 30-40.
• Want to move from their data centres to AWS data centres with Oracle databases.

Larry then explained how the Open MultiCloud Era where services on difference clouds work gracefully together. They are open.

Larry then concluded his keynote talking about user identity, how biometrically authenticated login can do away with passwords! And network security with Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR).

Oracle ACE Lounge, Exhibition Hall and Evening Meal

The final part of the day was visiting the Oracle ACE lounge and meeting my fellow ACEs.

The Version 1 ACEs 😎 (Rishin Mitra, Graham Smith and myself)

Meeting new ACEs from around the world, here is Manish Naik from USA 👍🏽

Then a wonder around the exhibition hall, talking to vendors and partners, as well as collecting some SWAG 😎

With the very last part of the day, having a lovely italian meal with my colleagues from Version 1 😁 (Rishin Mitra, Charlie M. Yousef, Tim German and Jeremy Simmons)

Tomorrow will be day 2 of the conference. Looking forward to it 👍🏽

You can view my day 4 here.

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)