The Six Five is “On The Road” at Oracle #CloudWorld. Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are live at Oracle CloudWorld 2022. Our coverage includes analysis on:
- Expansion of OCI – Oracle Cloud
- Expansion of MySQL HeatWave
- Various Silicon Partnerships – NVIDIA & AMD
- Core Service Improvements
- Oracle Industry & Vertical Solutions – Oracle Cloud ERP & Oracle Cloud SCM, & Oracle Cerner
- Oracle/ Redbull F1
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Hi, this is Pat Moorhead. We’re live here at Oracle CloudWorld 2022 in Las Vegas in real life. I am here with my incredible co-host, Daniel Newman. Daniel, how are you doing, my friend?
Daniel Newman: Hey everybody. I’m good, man. The Six Five “On the Road” at Oracle CloudWorld and we’re sitting at the news desk and it’s kind of snazzy. I feel neat, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: I know, kind of sitting here at the desk, I got my notes in front of me. Usually, it’s on a smartphone or a piece of paper. I kind of feel like official here, but we just came out of Larry Ellison’s keynote here. Man, I got to give that guy a ton of credit. Comes out there, nails it, talking about new products. I mean how often do you get to see founders of companies that 30 years later they’re still running the show?
Daniel Newman: Yeah. I got to say, it kind of broke my heart a little bit that I think he looks younger than me. I think he’s twice as old as me to be factual. Yeah, he came out with a lot of energy. Very Larry-esque in terms of the style. I mean he was pretty straightforward about their competitive positioning. Didn’t really seem to have any fear about going after where they’re differentiated, where there may be some price advantages. Also, Pat, I really did like the fact that he sort of unveiled for the first time the bigger vision of this 27 billion dollar Cerner acquisition.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. No, he definitely went deep on that. Daniel, there’s been so many announcements here. I don’t always gauge the amount of announcements by the thickness of the briefing book, but Oracle CloudWorld has been incredible and literally it’s only day one. We’re going to talk about day two stuff as well because we’ve got a sneak peek on there. A ton of announcements. A ton of themes. Maybe, yeah, go ahead.
Daniel Newman: No, I was just going to say, so maybe we do it like a Six Five. We’ve got about six topics. Now we could say topic one we just finished, which was the Larry keynote, and then maybe, I don’t know, do you have a list in front of you that we could maybe run off of?
Patrick Moorhead: Gosh, I might have a list right here.
Daniel Newman: Why don’t we try that?
Patrick Moorhead: One of the big themes of the show here was OCI expansion and, Daniel, as we’ve talked about before, OCI Gen 1, and even Clay Magouyrk said this yesterday, not that competitive, right? Five services. Now OCI Gen 2, over a hundred services and big name customers all over that. Some of the key announcements were, well, it was really about expansion. Right? You had Alloy, Oracle is offering to systems integrators and service providers access to the cloud. They can white label it, put all of their businesses on top of that. I think that’s really a sign of maturation, and we’ll check in next year to see what happened.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I like the expansion. I thought Clay was really fun in the analyst media session, very sort of self-deprecating about the Gen 1 cloud, “Hey, we had one region and five services. Look at us now.” I mean what a progression over five years. By the way, the time from Oracle Gen 1 launched to now is about the same amount of time Futurum Research has been around. I just want to point that out. We’ve come a long way too. Never miss a chance to do a little self-promoting or tap my microphone just to frustrate the producers.
The other thing though, Pat, that I thought was really interesting was Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, showing up to talk about the relationship and the partnership between Nvidia and Oracle. My big take beyond the fact that I think Nvidia obviously leads the market in many of its advancements in AI and frameworks for AI, is that Jensen doesn’t show up very often.
Patrick Moorhead: He doesn’t. He may show up for The Six Five.
Daniel Newman: He did.
Patrick Moorhead: Like he did. He doesn’t normally do that, does he?
Daniel Newman: No, he doesn’t show up often. When someone like him shows up, my immediate interpretation is he’s really doubling down. Now, again, this was not a new partnership, this was an expansion on an existing partnership. Pat, we all know that the big hyperscale cloud providers are all focused on homegrown Silicon. With the Ampere partnership, with what Oracle is doing, they’re saying, “We want to build for custom. We want to advance with Silicon development,” but they’re not necessarily taking that same stance. Could Jensen be saying Oracle is the next big cloud that it sees Nvidia scaling around its technology?
Patrick Moorhead: Well, he very well could be. The company is under pressure. Everybody’s going after them. Not only for training, but also data center solutions. Maybe just to close out this topic, Oracle did make, and we’ll put more of the notes in the show notes, it came out with core service improvements, whether that’s pre-trained AI, otherwise known as auto AI, came out with cloud native apps, low code development and security solutions. All in all, OCI is on the move. Listen, I’m embarrassed to go back. Well, I’m not embarrassed to go back and look what I wrote about OCI 1, because quite frankly, Clay agrees. Congratulations Oracle.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Yeah, I like that you pointed out the APEX low code stuff. We needed something else named APEX just to keep everyone.
Patrick Moorhead: By the way, I did a total double take and I thought it was maybe an alignment with Dell or something.
Daniel Newman: Yes. We were getting all the emails with invites to sessions about APEX and I did not know which company was inviting me. Something for us to… Hopefully you and I can help sort out for the market. You want to move on to topic three?
Patrick Moorhead: Heck yeah, let’s get into HeatWave. HeatWave expansion, as we saw, both our companies wrote white papers on it. We wrote a bunch of articles on basically a super optimized MySQL data solution. Essentially an appliance. It’s in memory, so it’s literally other solutions might be in flash or hard drive. This is in memory, so it is going to be an order of magnitude bigger. Oracle announced a data lake house, essentially a data warehouse in a data lake here to just take that step next further and also, dare I say, even get a little bit more open where you can align with things like MongoDB, you can align with other lakehouse space.
Daniel Newman: Cloudera.
Patrick Moorhead: Cloudera, didn’t see it, but I’m hoping we will see this in the future. Quite frankly, no HeatWave introduction would be complete without going through a laundry list of how it absolutely trounces other solutions like Snowflake, 17 times faster than Snowflake based on TPC benchmarks. See both of our white papers that will be coming out very shortly for details.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I would recommend looking at the work of somebody else on our respective teams, Steve McDowell, Matt Campbell, and then, of course, Wreck It Ron Westfall over here at Futurum Research. They did cover this really well and went into a lot of depth on the benchmarks, but that is one of the things that from the onset of HeatWave, continuous performance. Pat, for us, it’s a challenge. We work with so many vendors and one of the things I always like is ground truth and benchmarks do give us ground truth. It’s the technical version of earnings, right?
Patrick Moorhead: Well, they do say there’s lies, there’s benchmarks, and there’s other lies. I know what you’re saying though, at least we have a number that we can work from.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Given the comparison… And, of course, they’re building a lot of the optimized results that we’re hearing about on AMD’s EPYC, which is a nice shout to AMD and what they’re doing, and again, another partnership on Silicon with Oracle.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. By the way, not surprised AMD was there. AMD does have the highest throughput single socket solution in the industry, so it totally makes sense from a bandwidth standpoint. Daniel, it was not just infrastructure, there was a lot of services and software. Why don’t you dive into the next, probably the biggest services announcement, the B2B Commerce Suite?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat, you and I have this running joke about connecting the back end to the front end, but realistically-
Patrick Moorhead: By the way, honestly, that is my thing. Whenever I get into trouble, I just connect the front end to the back end and you’re good.
Daniel Newman: Yes. Well, that is a lot of what application suites are doing. Now it’s become a bit of a running joke between us, but in reality, most companies are challenged by the extraordinary amounts of data, the disparate systems and trying to get all these different technologies to fluidly talk to each other. Let’s be candid, the largest companies in the world have the most complexity. It’s just how it is.
With what the company is doing with its B2B Commerce Suite, it really is leaning in with a couple of basically world renowned brands, JPMorgan Chase in the financials, and then FedEx in logistics and transportation and basically saying, “How do we fully connect the backend systems? How do we take the system of record data in ERP and in SCM and basically merge it all together with transaction data to improve the customer experience?”
Now, I want to be very clear, the focus is on B2B transactions and B2B commerce. The fact of the matter is the automation of these processes, when you’re talking about not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of simultaneous transactions in finance where you’re doing anything from trying to understand a customer withdrawing money from an ATM all the way to trying to procure equipment or schedule jet planes to fly from the US to China with goods, these are complex transactions with many moving parts.
Having a system that can streamline all of these concurrent activities, manage it into the system of record, do it fluidly, is not only a huge way to improve that customer experience B2B, Pat, but it’s actually a way to manage the data, increase reliability, improve productivity, and reduce friction all throughout the system.
Larry talked about in his keynote with autonomous databases, the fact is most errors are human. That is not limited to databases, that is limited to most systems of record, garbage in, garbage out. Increase automation, increase the fluidity of the systems and the technology, make commerce frictionless and that’s, I think, what they’re really setting out to do. It’s competitive. They’re not the only ones trying to do it, but I am impressed and I like the fact that they’re starting with two major companies that if they can be successful, big proof point.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. If I were to pull one keyword out of your analysis, the most important, it was fluidity, right? Because all companies make this happen today, but they do it either basically one or two general ways. If it’s electronic, they ETL data out and they suck it in. I guess there’s a third way with API based, but the third way is just doing it based on paper and people, a, I guess we’d call that, analog transformation. No, I’m just kidding there. Again, you ask why does this even matter? I take this down to three benefits.
It’s lowering cost, it’s improving the customer experience, but I think even more importantly, if you want to couple the new offering, a new business, maybe go into as a service much more quickly enabling that front to back commerce combination between ERP systems in the back end and the commerce systems on the front… Sorry, I can’t say without laughing a little bit. It’s our joke, the front end of the back end.
Daniel Newman: Never going away.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it’s good. Now my final thought here was you and I both attended NetSuite SuiteWorld. Boy, does this seem… Kind of reminded me a little of the SuiteBanking, which literally had different, more tailored partners to small businesses. It was interesting and coincident in the timing.
Daniel Newman: It’s kind of like Fusion is NetSuite’s big aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, sister. I think even what was said by Steve Miranda was companies that go public, they start on NetSuite and then they grow up and they move to Fusion. There’s a little bit of… You could see a little bit of that maturing process in the announcements from SuiteWorld to CloudWorld here.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. One of the other themes that I think you and I saw here was growth in industries. Right? We started off, or you started off, talking about Larry’s keynote, he talked a lot about the value of Cerner. A lot of companies kind of talk about going vertical, but typically what that is that’s a sales and marketing motion with a few specific verticals, but it’s really a horizontal play.
A lot of the capabilities that Oracle is offering here are true vertical solutions. People actually run their businesses, and typically where they’ve had their most success in highly regulated industries where data matters the most. That’s banking, that’s healthcare, that’s pharmaceuticals like this. Heck, we even saw an announcement here on public safety where essentially, and I wish we could see it here, but there’s a full squad car that I think both of us got the opportunity to ride in that is a complete digitization of public safety all the way from the call comes in to 911, they do a situational analysis, they’re seeing who’s there, everything’s on camera as well.
It’s not just a police thing, it’s also citizen, it’s accountability, but the ability to know what the police are walking into or what the fire service is walking into as they go in is super impressive. What did you see related to industries, Daniel?
Daniel Newman: Well, over the last couple of years I’ve seen a pretty big trajectory upwards in terms of how companies are positioning themselves to be able to serve verticals. What I’ve been really talking about over the last couple of years has been it’s time for the rubber to meet the road proverbially. You used the police car, so there’s an analogy. Right now, industries like healthcare, financial services that are highly regulated have very specific requirements that you can’t just put a veneer on anymore. I think Oracle-
Patrick Moorhead: Well, it’s actually getting harder.
Daniel Newman: Oracle’s really saying that, “Look, we’ve got this deep domain expertise.” What is it? 400,000 plus customers. Their database is pretty much… Every major company on the planet it feels like is using Oracle in some capacity. They’ve got a lot of this sort of inherent know-how about working in these businesses. Trying to take together ERP systems, CRM systems, CX technologies, supply chain management, human capital management, kind of putting these all together with a bit of a tailored industry makes a lot of sense. Like I said, the Cerner unveiling has got to be wildly opportunistic for the company to say, “Hey.” Larry did literally say he wants to create two new systems, a national system and a global system to take healthcare and streamline it from end to end. If there is not a better example though, Pat, on the planet of what’s possible, I can’t think of it. I cannot think of it.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I’m paying attention. I’m trying to find a tweet that I put out on some of the companies that they support in healthcare, but also in pharmaceuticals. The one that really surprised me, and, again, I don’t know if it’s a vertical, but it’s these cloud native companies like Lyft and Uber using Fusion applications to power the business. That was the one picture I took in Steve Miranda’s shorthand presentation, super shocked at just how many cloud native companies use that. It was almost like blowing the whistle. You think of all these companies would normally just write all their own software. Right? They might be sitting on a layer of IaaS and maybe using some PaaS services from somebody, but doing it all on their own. If you look at every one of those companies, Uber, Lyft, all of them are involved in very highly regulated industry.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. The sort of digital disruptors have to run their technology on a platform that’s kind of its own industry in a lot of ways. Pat, here’s something I can be sure of. Over the next several years the industry marketing standard by tech is only going to get more. It’s going to proliferate. It’s going to become more involved in every buying decision. Personalization, Pat. People want to know that the technology they’re buying isn’t just made for the problem they’re trying to solve, but also for their industry and that their fellow companies, their fellow CIOs, decision makers are settled that this is the standard in many ways. It’s going to be very competitive, this industry marketing.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, I think it’s funny, you think things like this could get easier, but the challenge has actually grown. You and I have talked about the accordion of the industry, meaning we centralize, then we decentralize. We’re in a state of decentralization now. We’re talking about data, particularly PII, and all of the balkanization of that data and we’re not actually getting easier to do business with, as in countries globally, it’s getting harder to do business with them.
Daniel Newman: Data’s exponential, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Hey, can I play play host for a second?
Patrick Moorhead: Sure. Go ahead.
Daniel Newman: I want to end our show talking about something that we’re both really excited about. Now this morning, by the way, Safra was, I thought, fantastic. I just want to make that… I had not heard Safra Catz give a keynote in some time in person. I was actually really engaged by her. I found her very compelling, which, again, just not seeing someone. Anyways, Christian Horner. Okay, I’m pretty sure you’re a Max Verstappen fan.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes sir.
Daniel Newman: Every weekend you remind me that the team that I might root for that isn’t Red Bull or Oracle didn’t win because it seems that Max wins every week. We had Christian Horner, the team principal, from Red Bull Racing here. Isn’t there something this weekend in Austin, Texas?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Austin Grand Prix might be starting on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Possibly yes, Oracle is a big part of… Now I heard Christian say this up there with Safra that basically, “Hey, we started winning when we put the Oracle logo on. Then, we put a bigger logo and we won even more.” Of course, he was having fun, but it is great to see the partnership between the two companies. Quite frankly, listen, I know esoteric F1 deals, did one in a previous life. All right, they did use our technology, but you and I also got the chance to talk with the Red Bull CMO. That was very clear about how he was a big fan of CrowdTwist, which Oracle bought, and how he does a virtual paddock.
Daniel Newman: Gamification, getting the fans, he mentioned that the race this week is going to have almost two and a half times more fans than the first time, 200,000 to 500,000, Pat. That means we’re going to be sitting in a lot of traffic trying to get to her this week. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be there, hoping that Red Bull does the job. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Of course, I refer a lot of the teams, I’m not going to lie, but it’s a lot of fun to see since we both love a winner.
Patrick Moorhead: We both like competition and we both like winners. While I’m really happy for my guy Max, I wish he hadn’t… Well, he didn’t win the title until Leclerc was pushed to the back for a five second penalty. I thought for sure he was going to win it in Austin, but you know what? I’m glad he won it overall.
Daniel Newman: Pat, you know what? Overall though, it’s amazing how much the technology we work in every day, databases, data, AI, intelligence, computer vision, compute, all these things come together to make these fast cars even faster. That’s so fun because it’s technology driven, but we’re going to have to wait and see how this weekend goes.
Patrick Moorhead: I know. You want to take us out?
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Thanks everybody for tuning in here to The Six Five on the road at Oracle CloudWorld. Pat, it was a lot of fun to be here with you. Hit that subscribe button, check out the show notes, lots more on all the announcements that we discussed. Tune into the Grand Prix this weekend. Is it another win for Oracle Red Bull? Hard to say no, but we will be there. We’ll be cheering. Look for us in the crowd. Don’t look too hard. We’ll see you all later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
