Today, Dec 14th,2020 Oracle announced that its Autonomous Database, released just two years ago, was recognized by Gartner in its recently published cloud database market reports. Oracle Autonomous Database scored highest in all four Use Cases in the 2020 Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Operational Use Cases” report. Oracle Autonomous Database runs natively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI. Oracle’s unique converged database enables organizations to use one database reducing complexity, cost and risk for customers.
Just three days ago, Oracle announced moving its headquarters from Redwood Shores, California, to Austin, Texas. According to Vaastu, the “archway to victory and progress in life”, the main door should face north, east or in the north-east direction. Regardless of this giant energy-block sitting in California or Texas, the doors to rest of the Americas open to the north, east or in the north-east direction! Did that just translate to the victory made in the Gartner’s magic Quadrant?
A tarot card reader for Oracle corporation is also called an Oracle! Jokes apart, what does it now mean for OCI and its pet AI services? It means that the organization should focus on what it does the best — traditional transactions.
Oracle claims their big advantage in AI is their unique access to enterprise data. These data points include historical and dynamic customer data such as click-stream and social activities, and inputs such as weather, lookalike audiences, etc. Such customer information can be mined to find customer behavior patterns. The long term vision is being able to have AI that can provide more seamless and natural direct customer service across platforms. The use of a single database product for both transactional and analytical use cases, rather than separate products.
Oracle has earned a sweet spot compared with its peers AWS and SAP in the “Operational Intelligence” category.
The market price and demand for the AI Ops technology are currently high. AIOps uses machine learning and data science to give IT operations teams a real-time understanding of any issues — including new, unforeseen problems for which rules haven’t been crafted yet — that affect the availability and performance of digital services. The data generated by systems about their internal operations — logs, metrics, traces, event records and more. This data is complex because of its high volume, specificity, variety, redundancy. Oracle as a vendor of in-database data mining, gives these advantages:
· eliminates data movement,
· speeds data mining,
· simplifies model deployment, and
· delivers security and scalability.
This strategy is similar to what Salesforce has been doing with its Einstein platforms and definitely play to Oracle’s strengths in the industry-solution space.
While Oracle seeks to improve the productivity of individual data scientists by automating their entire workflow, the augmented staff such as Ops should not be ignored. They have the ability to generate the tsunami of use cases and data required to build, train, and manage machine learning algorithms on the Oracle Cloud using Python, TensorFlow, Keras, Jupyter, and other simple tools. Furthermore, Oracle offers the natural advantage to operational teams through its capabilities such as shared projects, model catalogs, team security policies, reproducibility, and audibility.
Unique Industry-AI-Ops Differentiator
I am unsure if by now, Gartner has an official definition of true ‘AI-Ops’, but I believe it to be an eco-system that attempts to unify insights from multiple big data monitoring streams. AIOps is a powerful technology, but it doesn’t solve every problem and by itself can’t make up for significant gaps in visibility data. With the move to delivering experience increasingly over the Internet, the visibility data gap becomes more like an abyss. This is where OCI AI services can deliver a solution that is a differentiator — Ready-to-use apps that can be quickly and easily tailored to specific uses while bridging the data gaps.
The biggest challenge for all public cloud vendors is how fast they must go not only to keep pace with but to gain ground on. In the database versus Oracle cloud debate, high-level evaluation of the specifications and costs of various infrastructure services suggest that Oracle has a lead-in price to performance for many services article also aligns well with enterprise needs when it comes to security and hybrid applications. Oracle cloud AI Ops will prove a viable option for enterprises with a large installed base of Oracle applications. Though Oracle is a late entrant, it has bought a very robust infrastructure to compete with other market players and can easily monetize the path within existing customers.
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