Editor’s note: With incremental service improvements announced at its annual user conference, Oracle has cemented itself as a worthy opponent at multiple points in the cloud stack, says Technology Business Research. Plus: Video overview of Oracle’s cloud management. This is the first of a two-part report fro Oracle World.

HAMPTON, N.H. – Oracle’s cloud business starts to land with customers With incremental service improvements announced at its annual user conference, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) has cemented itself as a worthy opponent at multiple points in the cloud stack. Where many of its most public competitors focus on any two of the three primary cloud layers, Oracle has established itself as an innovative and high-performance option at the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS layers.

In SaaS, Oracle’s portfolio now has feature parity with legacy application suites across all application pillars, serves many global points underserved by other applications vendors, and is being augmented with blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning capabilities.

At the PaaS layer, Oracle’s fully autonomous database will change the way customers run and manage their workloads. And, foundationally, at the IaaS layer Oracle has re-architected and enhanced its infrastructure to provide measurably faster services that drastically reduce customers’ costs per workload.

  • VIDEO: Watch highlights about Oracle’s cloud management at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quaOED2kFKo

Oracle’s most noticeable shortcomings are its market reputation as a difficult-to-work-with legacy software vendor and the fact that its superior Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services are only available in three data center regions at this time, but Oracle is actively investing to quickly counter both of those growth inhibitors.

With these improvements, Oracle will likely emerge as a strong challenger in the cloud space, particularly in the SaaS and IaaS markets.

Event overview

Oracle used its OpenWorld stage to announce enhancements at all levels of its cloud stack, orienting itself into a more aggressive cloud competitor and emphasizing investment in advanced innovation. Underpinning the rest of its cloud offerings, Oracle further enhanced its Bare Metal Cloud, renamed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), to be even faster than other IaaS offerings.

To do so, Oracle announced faster compute from its new X7 line of compute instances, an industry-first deployment of NVIDIA GPUs on bare metal, all-flash block storage at no additional cost, 25GB network bandwidth, integrated DNS, as well as customer support in the form of both packaged migrations for legacy Oracle application suites and certified Tier 1 system integrator partners.

Moreover, these enhanced OCI services were made available at a third Oracle data center, this one in Frankfurt, Germany. Multiple customers validated the superior performance of Oracle’s infrastructure services over other named competitors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix, implying that Oracle’s share of the IaaS market will grow as customers test and realize the performance uplift available (as well as the cost savings that creates) from Oracle.

The event’s headlining announcement, however, came at the PaaS layer this year: Database 18c, a completely autonomous database, will be generally available as early as December 2017. The autonomous database reduces cost and increases reliability as it removes all human interaction outside data loading and querying. For customers to get the fully autonomous database and its service level agreement (SLA), they must purchase three key features: multitenancy, Real Application Cluster (RAC), and data guard.

TBR expects Oracle will quickly implement its autonomous database internally, to create cost savings, improve reliability and offer greater data security to Oracle’s SaaS customers. Greater data security assurances, in particular, will prove valuable as Oracle processes more and more customer data to hone and run machine learning functionality within business applications.

Adaptive Intelligence Apps

Oracle brought the notion of data- and machine learning-driven applications to bear with the evolution of Adaptive Intelligent Apps, and made continued references to “smart” rather than the common artificial intelligence or cognitive buzzwords used by many peers. Building on last year’s initial introduction of Adaptive Intelligent Applications, Oracle positioned these enhancements as initially opt-in functionality that will become fully embedded across its SaaS suites in the future.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development, noted these were not a monetization angle for Oracle to squeeze more revenue out of each customer; instead these functions will be included in the already available applications. Only adaptive intelligence functionality in two areas, Next-Best Offers & Recommendations and Coordinated Open-Time Content, are currently available within the CX Cloud Suite, but other capabilities like Best Sales Action, Optimized Supplier Payment Terms, Dynamic Pricing, Best-Fit Candidates and many others will become available across application suites in the undefined near future. Oracle’s refreshing frankness came along with executives admitting these functionalities are still in the early days and will take years to perfect, especially where auditability of decisions and suggestions is concerned.

However, TBR notes that these capabilities, layered into Oracle Cloud Applications at no additional cost to users, quickly elevate the value of Oracle’s solutions in the competitive landscape, especially where competitors with artificial intelligence capabilities, like SAP, are charging customers for additional services if they want the functionality alongside their business applications.

The base of Oracle Cloud Applications, into which these smart capabilities are built, was also updated at the event, though reaction paled in comparison to the enthusiasm and attention the other announcements garnered. As the most tenured piece of Oracle’s cloud stack, the SaaS suites were already robust, but additions announced at the event elevated the portfolios to feature parity with many of the legacy products.

Product launches included four new enterprise performance management (EPM) products, eight new supply chain management (SCM) products, four new human capital management (HCM) products and a more integrated approach to the customer experience (CX) portfolio as additional features were added.

Moreover, Oracle improved on industry-specific capabilities in the suites as well. Ultimately, the improvements to Oracle Cloud Applications, though not headline announcements at the event, will help Oracle more effectively win customers in the competitive SaaS market, as the company nears an inflection point in its financials where the NetSuite acquisition will stop contributing an inorganic year-to-year uplift within reported SaaS revenue.

Part Two: The times they are a-changin’ (sort of)

(C) TBR