5 Takeaways from Oracle OpenWorld London 2020

Oracle wrapped-up its most anticipated European conference of the year last week in London, Oracle OpenWorld 2020. The event attracts thousands of people, who come to discover the endless possibilities of technology and the trends that will drive the industry.

As always Team Boxfusion exhibited over the two days and while there are plenty of things to talk about from the event, we are reporting 5 key takeaways from Oracle OpenWorld 2020.

1. Autonomous Databases #

Oracle has truly reinvented the database management with its family of self-driving and self-repairing, autonomous databases. It is not limited to ETL processes, segments, dimensions, analysis and reports; and supports a complex combination of real-time analytics, Internet of things, machine learning and artificial intelligence in a single database.

These autonomous databases underpin all of Oracle’s Cloud applications, driving efficiency and high-performance, and will shift the way users interact with data, ensuring increased security, accuracy and operational efficiency while eliminating manual labour, errors and tuning needs.

2: Borderless Cloud Innovation #

Following their announcement of offering ‘cross-cloud capabilities’ to its customers last year, two juggernauts emphasised the inter-operability of their services.

'We truly believe we're better together', said Nick Wallace, Director, Microsoft Azure, while talking about Interconnected relationship between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

This inter-connectivity allows their customers to extend their on-premise data centres to both clouds, unify identity, access management and resource management with combined sign-on experience as well as a collaborative support model to leverage customer relationships and processes. Oracle also drew attention to its promise of securing its customers’ data in its cloud, even at the level of the processor.

3: Blockchain: Antidote to Mistrust #

We are living in a world of data mistrust, so the biggest barriers to the cloud and shared-infrastructure adoption are consumer scepticism and insecurity. Oracle OpenWorld did a great job at highlighting the capabilities of Blockchain as an antidote to that scepticism with its Enterprise Blockchain Solution.

Oracle spoke at length about the pivotal role Blockchain will play for the 'enterprises of the future'. Through various sessions, Oracle demonstrated many use cases of Blockchain beyond the scope of finance and how effectively Enterprise-wide Blockchain Solutions could align high-level strategy, optimise resources, and maximise profits. Some of the highlights were Blockchain Beer, Supply Chain with Blockchain and the Oracle Smart City concept.

4: Machine Learning and AI #

Oracle remains true to its strategic vision of integrating Machine learning and AI across its platforms. During her keynote, Safra Catz announced the availability of Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform designed to allow businesses to create, deploy, train and manage their own machine learning and AI models.

‘Use data to make your business more competitive, more successful, whilst spending significantly less. The things that used to take days, are now instantaneous. We want you to devote your resources to the things that make you better.’
Safra Catz, CEO, Oracle

The platform is aimed at enhancing the data-science team’s efficiency with features like shared projects, model catalogues, team security policies and audit ability.

5: True Transformation Never Ends #

Digital transformation has been the talk of the tech-town for nearly a decade and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down, as the innovations emerge, great organisations keep leveraging them for improved customer insights, effective financial judgement and streamlined processes.

Speaking about Oracle’s continued commitment towards creating a solution that operates effectively for modern enterprises, Safra Catz said,

‘You can’t waste those resources duplicating your effort, sub optimising your business. Though all transformations start, the truest transformation never ends. That’s really where we find ourselves now. We are at a position here at Oracle where we feel like an overnight success, 15 years in the making.’

Beyond these takeaways, we found several exciting CX related sessions that built upon these foundational elements of Oracle's capabilities. The central theme was the core importance of data in the new economy, highlighted by Oracle CX Unity’s capability to combine different online, off-line and 3rd party data sources into a single platform to offer a truly complete view of the customer.

While on the Siebel technology side, our favourite moment was our own Geraint Thomas’ session on ‘User Experience capabilities of Siebel CRM' (we may be biased!). We also learned of Oracle's commitment towards a new containerisation architecture for Siebel; offering Siebel as a service is set to significantly increase agility and reduce the cost for Siebel customers.

Finally, we got the opportunity to discuss the future of CX and CRM technologies with fellow CX enthusiasts and take some fun pictures with our team. We are a fan of OpenWorld’s innovative and vibrant style, and we cannot wait to see you at the next one.

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