Previously we shared with you how the vision for Oracle Cloud Applications is to make them even more transformative, innovative, and essential for business operations. As Steve Miranda, EVP of Applications Development shared at Oracle OpenWorld, the speed of business agility is the “next big thing.” 
In parallel with Oracle’s discussions about cloud applications, Oracle delivered many OpenWorld presentations and announcements about cloud platforms and infrastructure. Here are some of the highlights.

Infrastructure

• Data centers: To support new classes and volumes of devices, Oracle is building highly scalable data centers. According to Thomas Kurian, President of Development, these feature the fastest processors, block storage, internal networks (25 Gigabit), and external DNS lookup in the market.

Platform

• Integrations: Oracle showed demos within several sessions about how to extend and integrate applications using a wide range of platform services. This approach enables hybrid workflows and data flows across on premises applications (including non-Oracle) and SaaS applications.For example, Amit Zavery, Senior VP of Cloud Platform Development, and his team showed cloud security, API management, integrations, machine learning, chatbots, big data and analytics, and the favorite topic among many media writers, blockchain. Look for more content from us about blockchain in coming months.
• API-first development: Taking advantage of more than 100 Oracle-built and crowd-sourced application adapters created by a community of more than 400,000 developers, Oracle’s API Cloud takes a new approach to business process design. In this approach, development and business teams design the desired business outcomes, then develop the APIs for bots and other interfaces.
• Data Cloud: Thomas Kurian shared in a session with media that applications are commoditizing, with only so many ways to automate a business process. In his view, the key differentiator is how effectively an organization uses its data in business processes to gain insights and tailor actions.One way to change the game is to augment the data a company generates with matching data sourced from outside the company. Oracle now is the third largest data provider after Google and Facebook, with about 4 billion customer profiles. The Oracle Data Cloud brings that graph of identities together, rationalized and ready for matching with company-generated data. According to Thomas, leading companies will use a combination of machine intelligence and clean data to make relevant recommendations and actions.

Learn More, Do More

That’s a brief recap of some of the hottest OpenWorld topics about cloud platform and infrastructure innovations. Look for more blog posts and other content from us to learn more.
 
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