How the Oracle flagship event changed in the wake of Covid-19 

A decade of Oracle events 

For the past 10+ years, the Oracle flagship conference and the largest gathering of the global Oracle community was an event we would and could not miss. While each year had its highlights and memorable moments, the one that will forever be a favourite is 2015, as that was the year Neos was awarded the Excellence Award for Business Analytics on the global level. 

From global to regional 

The Oracle flagship event has changed significantly during the past decade. I remember when the event was still hosted in San Francisco in a supersized format, where the audience the size of half of San Francisco attended to explore the latest Oracle news, trends and technologies. 

In 2020 Oracle adopted a new, regional direction, and instead of one mega event, it split the conference in regional events – Dubai, London, Singapore, Las Vegas and (possibly) a Sao Paolo event. We had arranged to sponsor all of them and managed to attend the Dubai and London events before the world came to a standstill. 

Two-year hiatus bears changes 

The first in-person Oracle conference after a two-year break was held this October in Las Vegas. The audience was lesser when compared to San Francisco, however much more focused on specific Oracle solutions, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

During the hiatus Oracle rebranded the event from OpenWorld to CloudWorld, clearly announcing Cloud as their new area of focus and investment. Even the visual approach is different – from the signature Oracle red, CloudWorld switched to sky blue. And just returning from Las Vegas, I can say that Oracle is betting on Cloud. Just as we are. 

Oracle Health 

The highlight of the first day was the keynote by Larry Ellison, Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer at Oracle. 

Larry opened by stating he would focus on two topics: the evolution of cloud infrastructure and a new generation of applications. The topic that was prevalent through his keynote was health, in the form of Oracle’s new healthcare system, the extension of expected lifespan and increased quality of life. 

If I was to knit pick, I would have preferred if Larry expressed more views regarding Oracle’s competition with AWS in regards of price and quality. None the less, hearing him speak was an event in itself. 

Long way from OCI gen 1 

During his keynote on the second day of CloudWorld, Clay Magouyrk, (Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) said that they were at a place in cloud that’s about a shift in focus and the way that they do things.  

In the past 15 years, since cloud really came about, there has been a lot of incremental progress. From OCI gen 1, when Oracle cloud meant 5 services in one region, today OCI has expanded to 40 regions, both commercial and government. From now on, the focus will be on how to enable all workloads and all customers to get all advantages of cloud computing by changing how cloud is delivered, operated and consumed.  

He emphasised the multicloud approach, stating that Oracle must embrace it and make it really easy for customers to use multiple clouds together. This approach is something that Neos has been promoting and implementing for years and we are happy that Oracle is on the same track on this issue. 

Connecting Oracle services with other clouds 

Another major area Clay referred to during his keynote were advancements in cloud hardware that make it easier to make fundamentally differentiated Oracle services available with other clouds. OCI azure interconnect was a first step in that direction, and this summer Oracle launched the Oracle Database Service for Azure. About a year ago MySQL Heatwave on AWS was introduced, and in November MySQL Heatwave on Azure will be introduced. And as of last year, Oracle Roving Edge, an infrastructure service designed to host workloads and use cases that operate at the edge, is available. 

Oracle Global Leaders 

As a cherry on top, the last official event of this year’s Oracle CloudWorld for us was the Oracle Global Leaders’ summit organized by Reiner Zimmermann, Vice President of Product Management at Oracle. Reiner is famous for organizing outstanding events with many networking opportunities, and this one was no exception. 

During the summit, Çetin Özbütün held his “Key takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld” presentation. He provided an overview of new Oracle Database 23c features, and it was great to see him present it in person. 

Finally, I want to extend my congratulations to winners of the Intel-Oracle Global Leaders Champions 2022 award: Deutsche Bank, Lyft, GOL Linhas Aéreas, retraced, DSP-Explorer, Vlamis Software Solutions Inc and PDI Technologies.  

Increased interest in multicloud cost management solutions 

Other than enjoying the first in-person major Oracle event in a while, it was of great value for us to sponsor Oracle CloudWorld. We witnessed increased interest in our multicloud cost management solution, CloudVane, which clearly states that we are on the right track.  

Thank you to the entire Oracle team developing cost management for their support and interest in what we do. 

Special thanks to our Oracle friends Phil Newman and Arun Ramakrishnan, whom we have worked with on many initiatives related to cloud usage and cost on OCI. They have been our life line in times of need for questions regarding usage and cost troubles, always ready to help and guide us towards a better path. In return, we gave our two cents by pointing out the issues we faced during our implementation of the CloudVane cost and usage collection module. Now we look forward to increasing the engagement of both Neos and Oracle in the FinOps community on many hot topics, including Open Standard of Cloud Billing. As Oracle steps up its Cloud Game with new services and flavours of OCI, so will we with our collaboration.

See you on next year’s Oracle CloudWorld!