AI will benefit Oracle as companies seek to build their specialised versions of GenAI programs such as ChatGPT.
Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said one project that Oracle could provide was a vector database containing anonymised electronic health records and other specialised training data for healthcare companies.
Database outfit Oracle reported strong earnings and promised a generative artificial intelligence service.
The database giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter net income of $3.32 billion, up from a $3.19 billion profit a year earlier. Earnings before certain costs, such as stock compensation, came to $1.67 per share, beating Wall Street’s target of $1.58 per share. Revenue rose 17 per cent from a year earlier, to $13.84 billion.
Chief Executive Safra Catz told analysts on a conference call that she’s looking for earnings of $1.12 to $1.16 per share on revenue growth of between 8-10 per cent. Wall Street had been looking for first-quarter earnings of $1.14 per share on revenue of $12.34 billion, which implies growth of just 7.8 per cent.
Analyst Gartner has warned that Oracle will target organisations on Java compliance.
Big G said that in the 12 months leading up to 31 December 2022, half of the Oracle software compliance and audit-related interactions focused on Oracle Java. In 2023 following some recent licensing changes mean that this will become an issue.
In 23 January 2023, Oracle introduced changes to Java SE licensing. Unlike the previous Java SE licence, which was measured either per named user or per processor basis, the new subscription includes usage across desktops, servers and third-party cloud deployments.
Oracle changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model could cost customers a bomb – especially in the long term.
Businesses with limited Java use would have to shell out thousands to license the software per employee under the new model.
Oracle claims its new Java SE Universal Subscription is “a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments.”
“Customers of the legacy Java SE Subscription products continue to receive all the original benefits and may renew under their existing terms and metrics,” it said.
Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operators and vendors’ revenue jumped 21 per cent to $544 billion in 2022.
New data from Synergy Research Group claims that the biggest growth was seen in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
Annual revenue from these services grew 29 per cent to reach more than $195 billion, despite some headwinds from the strengthening US dollar and problems in the Chinese market.
In the other main segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $229 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 19 per cent from 2021.
Synergy said public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 13 per cent from the previous year.
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member, Arrow Electronics has added the vendor’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services to ArrowSphere.
Oracle’s cloud services are designed to help enterprises run their most demanding workloads securely.
Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in EMEA Eric Nowak said that his outfit’s relationship with Oracle had lasted 20 years and adding OCI services to ArrowSphere is the next logical step.
Oracle has laid off more than 200 employees from its cloud unit.
The cuts occurred this week and affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The cuts follow other redundancies in Oracle’s North America cloud and technology unit.
The affected roles include ones working on OCI object storage, operations and support and engineering architecture.
The news comes months after Oracle completed its acquisition of healthcare systems vendor Cerner. Oracle’s plans to dominate electronic healthcare systems with its new subsidiary.
Oracle reported its most recent quarterly earnings in September, avoiding the heightened cloud budget concerns voiced by cloud vendor giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud in its October earnings reports.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has released its first Confidential Compute solution powered by AMD EPYC processors to its partners.
Oracle claims the product allows customers to enable Confidential VMs with the help of AMD Infinity Guard and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Memory Encryption (SME).
These features take advantage of security components available in 2nd and 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors available in all OCI’s E3 and E4 shapes.
Cybersecurity firm Wiz has found another major vulnerability within a popular cloud-storage environment.
After identifying multiple security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s heavily used Azure cloud services, Wiz researchers are now saying they recently found a “critical vulnerability” in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that could have allowed “unauthorised access to cloud storage volumes of any customer.”
Wiz said the vulnerability was spotted in June and quickly fixed within 24 hours by Oracle, and was one of the most severe cloud vulnerabilities reported.
Oracle co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison claims he is beating Amazon Web Services on price.
Ellison claimed that some of AWS’ “most famous brands” plan to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
He said. “And the AWS bill is getting very large. And they can save a huge amount of money by moving to OCI. And we expect next quarter we’ll be announcing some brands and companies moving off of Amazon to OCI that will shock you.”
He continued: “The amount of money these huge companies, these very famous companies, spend with Amazon is kind of staggering. I mean, everyone assumes, ‘Hey, I move to the cloud, and I save a lot of money.’ Depends which cloud you move to. And Oracle is much less expensive than the competition. … We’re talking to the most famous brands that are running Amazon and some of them are going to be moving very soon.”
Oracle has extended its cloud agreement with AT&T for another five years.
The move will give new capacity and capabilities for AT&T’s database and application workloads running in Oracle Cloud, the company said.
This includes building on its use of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer experience (CX) management, and Oracle’s cloud infrastructure (OCI) offering.
Jon Summers, senior vice president of information technology at AT&T said: “We’ve worked closely with Oracle on some of our toughest technology challenges over the years, and we’re excited to renew this collaboration for another five years.”
Oracle staff are furious that they did not predict that they would be victims of “widespread company layoffs”.
The database licence peddler has begun a raft of job cuts which is apparently part of an “organisational restructure”. The irony is that some of those told to vacate the building were only hired in the last six months and they are having no problem finding work because there is a skills shortage.
Most of those given the boot are workers in the US and Europe in areas like marketing for software applications that automate customer service and ecommerce functions.
Oracle had about 143,000 full-time employees, according to its most recent annual report.
Oracle is considering letting the axeman loose in the building and implementing cost-cutting measures worth up to $1 billion by August.
The job losses would disproportionately impact thousands of staff mostly in the US and Europe in marketing for software systems that automate customer support and e-commerce functions.
The firm is increasing spending in other areas, which is why the planned layoffs, which are expected to begin as soon as August, are being made.
Two top Oracle executives CMO Ariel Kelman, who arrived from AWS two years ago and has been in charge of the team working with TikTok, and Juergen Lindner, senior vice president of marketing for SaaS, are going.
Oracle has announced an employee experience platform for workers contemplating life after the pandemic lockdowns.
Dubbed Oracle ME the platform is described as “a complete employee experience platform to help organisations increase employee engagement and ensure employee success”.
It is part of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) product suite.
Oracle’s Yvette Cameron said: “The way we work is drastically different to a few years ago, so employee experience, as a category, needs to reflect that.”
She claims that Oracle ME is the only end-to-end employee experience platform in the market built natively into a cloud HCM platform.
Enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025, according to research by Gartner.
This rapid shift in buying habits, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, has seen widespread adoption of cloud-based infrastructures, applications and business process services. In fact, Gartner says almost two-thirds (65.9 percent) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7 percent in 2022.
There is a shedload of pressure for suppliers to come up with viable options. Gartner vice president Michael Warrilow said: “Technology and service providers that fail to adapt to the pace of cloud shift face increasing risk of becoming obsolete or, at best, being relegated to low-growth markets.”
Public cloud services are expected to exceed $480 billion this year. Much of the optimism for this growth is based on the big cloud suppliers’ strategy towards industry clouds, virtualised cloud solutions based on increasing sophistication and integration of services. Last year, all three suppliers announced industry cloud strategies.
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024