OracleVoice: The Machine Learning 'Revolution' And Other Emerging-Tech Takeaways From Oracle OpenWorld

At a recent gathering of startup founders at his home in Silicon Valley, Larry Ellison, Oracle's indefatigable executive chairman, CTO, and cofounder, had some fun with the wacky notion that the cloud platform, service, and infrastructure giant had somehow become a "dinosaur." Ellison told his guests that making Oracle ever-more successful and proving the naysayers wrong are always top of mind, joking that he thought about bidding on the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History and displaying it in the Oracle lobby. But a very dangerous dinosaur," he said. At Oracle OpenWorld this month, Oracle executives, partners, and customers revealed just how dangerous an innovator the company continues to be. They laid out cutting-edge products and services powered by a range of emerging technologies, including machine learning, predictive analytics, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. What follows are just six highlights. Calling machine learning a "technology that's every bit as revolutionary as the internet," Ellison described how Oracle is building machine learning-based databases and applications that get smarter as they take in more and more data. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without rules-based programming. "The more data we have these computer systems look at, we say we're'training' the computer system," Ellison said during his second keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, on October 3. "And as the computers begin to identify patterns in the data, identify abnormalities in the data, they then can make predictions.