Oracle Cloud Services Double Down on Machine Learning

Oracle is boosting its cloud platform with 12 new global regions and autonomous capabilities as it tries to regain ground following a disappointing quarter for Oracle cloud services and continues to lag behind Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. At its CloudWorld event in New York on Monday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that enterprises are not going to want to bring the same level of complication as their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, and that automation is going to help them simplify their IT investments by cutting down on labor costs and driving efficiency, following a broader trend among cloud services vendors who are using machine learning to capture more customers. Oracle executives were brought on stage throughout the keynote to demonstrate new capabilities in Oracle cloud services centered around automation, including expansion of its Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services beyond the Oracle Autonomous Database, which Oracle's Larry Ellison spoke about in September. He said the self-healing database, which automates patching cycles, could prevent companies from being the next Equifax. Oracle will expand on this offering with multiple autonomous services in 2018, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service for analytics, Oracle Autonomous Database OLTP for transactional and mixed workloads, and Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database.