Oracle CloudWorld returned for 2023 and, with that, Big Red has announced expanded collaborations, enhanced cloud offerings and new innovations to help organizations across the globe make the most out of their Oracle solutions.
One of the announcements saw Oracle and Red Hat expanding their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. As part of this expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift will be supported and certified to run on OCI. Red Hat OpenShift on OCI will be available for customer-managed installations using certified configurations of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, running on OCI Compute virtual machines and bare metal instances.
Oracle has introduced new features to MYSQL HeatWave, which include support for vector store, generative AI, new in-database machine learning features, MYSQL Autopilot enhancements, new HeatWave Lakehouse capabilities, support for JavaScript, acceleration of JSON queries and support for new analytic operators.
AI updates with private LLM search
Oracle has also announced the limited availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service. The new service will support large language models (LLMs) to help organizations automate end-to-end business processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences, while keeping their data secure and private.
Built on OCI in collaboration with Cohere, it is a managed service, currently in private preview, that enables users to integrate LLMs in their own applications through an available API.
Oracle is additionally planning to add semantic search capabilities using AI vectors to Oracle Database 23c, code named ‘App Simple’. The new collection of features, called AI Vector Search, includes a new vector data type, vector indexes and vector search SQL operators that enable Oracle Database to store the semantic content of documents, images and other unstructured data as vectors, and use these to run fast similarity queries.
AI Vector Search will allow customers to leverage large language models (LLMs) with their proprietary data for more accurate answers than using models trained on public data only. These capabilities will be also added to Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) to help marketers, sellers and service agents grow revenue and deliver exceptional customer experience.
It follows announcements of AI services for healthcare supply chains as well as a collaborative solution with Uber for last-mile delivery.
An array of OCI updates
Elsewhere, Oracle has expanded distributed cloud offerings to help organizations gain more flexibility to deploy cloud services while addressing a variety of data privacy, data sovereignty and low latency requirements. The latest additions to OCI’s distributed cloud include Oracle Database@Azure and MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse on AWS. Oracle also announced an increased global partner adoption of its cloud infrastructure cloud platform, Oracle Alloy.
OCI will have three new open-source data management cloud services and three significant enhancements to existing ones. These new cloud services include Redis, OpenSearch and Apache Spark, all of which deliver the required performance and reliability for mission-critical applications to OCI Data Lake. Enhancements to these cloud services allow for the simplification of processes to analyze data.
Additionally, the company has announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on OCI. Designed for cloud native and Java developers, the capabilities will help build more responsive and efficient cloud native applications while reducing costs.
More governance for users
Finally, Oracle has announced updates to Oracle Access Governance to help IT teams better assign, monitor and manage user access to applications and other tech resources. This cloud-native service provides detailed visibility into how users interact with technology resources, helping to reduce risk by allowing only authorized users to use, see or interact with restricted assets.
