I just returned from my third consecutive trip out to Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference. The highly attended conference brings 60,000 attendees into the heart of downtown San Francisco to enjoy four days of keynotes, sessions, customer success stories and vendor presentations all related to the Oracle family of products. I wanted to share a few highlights in case you weren’t able to attend.
New Product Announcements
Oracle continues to innovate, making over two dozen new product release announcements at the conference. Most notably, Oracle diverted slightly from its heavy diet of “cloud” and established an innovative direction toward system autonomy. In the words of Larry Ellison, “when you reduce human labor, you reduce human error.” Ellison went on to opine that new advances in machine learning technology allow automated activities to be more efficient, therefore reducing costs. The most notable releases came straight from Larry Ellison himself, during his opening night keynote address.
Oracle 18c Autonomous Database
This revolutionary new database will leverage Machine Learning to fully automate database maintenance. The autonomous database will monitor itself, tune itself, back itself up, and even complete patches…all without human interaction. Oracle’s Autonomous database promises 99.995% uptime. The remaining .005% of downtime will be planned, which annually accounts for 30 minutes per year.
Highly Automated Database Cyber Security
Oracle believes that modern cybersecurity demands greater automation in order to be effective. Their new cyber defense technology will able to detect attacks in real time, and will then, automatically and immediately, secure your data. Oracle’s database defense system will automatically patch itself while running so customers won’t experience a delay caused by waiting for a downtime window. The automated cybersecurity product will be able to analyze enormous amounts of data and identify abnormal patterns and anomalies, all in real time.
JD Edwards
Although the annual Collaborate and InFocus conferences offer the best JD Edwards related content, the JD Edwards team at Oracle still uses the OpenWorld conference to communicate its vision and direction for the product. For the JD Edwards community, Oracle is still encouraging customers to move towards running a code current installation of JDE by upgrading to EnterpriseOne 9.2. Oracle will support version 9.2 through at least 2028. (Read more about the Premier Support extension here.) Customers should keep in mind that 10 years is an eternity in the tech industry. Oracle also wants customers to not only upgrade to 9.2 but to also take advantage of UX One that is available to them in the newer version. The JD Edwards team also affirmed its commitment to a continuous innovation and delivery model for the product. To learn more about Oracle’s direction with the JD Edwards product, you can read our article Looking Ahead: Oracle’s JDE Strategy and Why You Should Care.
It’s Party Time!
Finally, what would OpenWorld be without its infamous customer appreciation events? This year featured two parties that were absolutely incredible! Tuesday night featured a party on Howard Street where attendees were treated to a concert by the Royal Machines.
For those of you who are unaware, Royal Machines is a supergroup cover band comprised of members of Guns N Roses, Jane’s Addiction, Alice in Chains, and Sugar Ray.
The band is known for bringing up surprise guests to their concerts. This year, we were treated to surprise guest DMC from Run-DMC!
Cloudfest17
The annual “Customer Appreciation Event” has been renamed to “Cloudfest.” This year’s concert featured The Chainsmokers and Ellie Goulding. As always, Oracle spares no expense with the event. Both artists were amazing. What a great way to end an awesome conference!
