4-months into Oracle – what have I found?

It has been a whirlwind first four months. At times it has felt like I am under a constant firehouse of information and like any large global enterprise it takes time (and more time needed!!) to map the organisation together to understand the sum of its parts. What I have been able to ‘compute’ has given me many reasons to feel privileged to be given this opportunity to lead the Oracle Cloud Public Sector business and be excited about the opportunity ahead. Thank you again Nick Wallace and Reinier Van Grieken for the opportunity! And thank you David Bibbs Martin Dolce Faraya Raja Dan Westley Cyril Kurien and Lisa Enright for your patience and support whilst I have onboarded.

My first observation is that we have many passionate people that genuinely care about making a difference for UK Public Sector. They work tirelessly with our customers to present a new Oracle that is laser focused on showing up differently and helping our customers and partners transform citizen services and back-office processes. I was fortunate to host all of my teams at an offsite in April and as a reflection of their hard work I was able to learn from our customers about the value they get from our services, and collaborate with partners such as 微软 and Mastek to understand how we drive success together and value for our customers. A personal highlight of mine was hearing from Nathan Hines on High Performance mindset.

There are some amazing customer stories that makes me feel proud and that we are making a real difference. In our Healthcare business Manchester Met University in partnership with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust?has developed an app on Oracle Cloud - FootSnap AI, that can identify diabetic foot ulcers, with an aims to reduce amputation rates and deliver significant time and cost-savings for health services. In our Education business University of Reading are leveraging OCI to create a digital platform to upload pictures of fruit trees to monitor and help mitigate the risks to pollination services caused by climate change. Leveraging Oracle Apex, a low code developer platform and OCI data services the team at University of Reading are starting to see spatial trends in fruit tree blossoming. In central government SSCL migrated its on-premises Oracle E-Business Suite and related applications to?Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to unlock cost savings, improve performance and security, and gain greater flexibility to innovate.

I was fortunate to attend a Round Table with Deputy PM Oliver Dowden following his speech on AI for Public Good which set out his ambition to position the UK as a leader in AI adoption to deal with some of the most pressing public policy challenges. This engagement accelerated my learning about Oracle’s AI value proposition for UK Public Sector. Since Oracle’s inception we have been a data company at our core initially creating a RDMS to enable organisations to perform complex data operations for the first time, so there is no surprise that this is embedded in our mission which is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, and unlock endless possibilities. Our investment in AI is threefold: 1) GPU Infrastructure: Bringing together a large number of GPUs to train Large Langue Model’s at scale. 2) OCI AI Services: Platform as a service solutions i.e. language, vision etc that customers can embed in their applications. 3) Embed in Oracle Applications: Applying these models across all of our SaaS offerings so they are easily leveraged. For example, over the next year we are integrating Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant into our electronic health records solution currently used by many NHS Trusts. This can cut down on paperwork by offering doctors a voice- and screen-powered user interface that automatically taking notes during conversations with patients and suggests actions such as ordering prescriptions. Very cool! At the same round table, I had the pleasure of meeting Aidan Gomez , Co-Founder and CEO of Cohere and got to better understand our partnership and much more to come in the future on that one!

I also attended my first Oracle Cloud World (OCW) and got to meet many customers and partners, hear from Paul Booth from Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on their Oracle Cloud journey, and take time to learn more about our differentiators. One of the key messages from OCW that has strongly resonated with me is Oracle’s ‘Everything Everywhere’ commitment to offer all available infrastructure, IaaS, PaaS & SaaS services in all our cloud regions including hybrid/dedicated solutions that our Public Sector customers can run in their own Data Centres including air gapped environments. This commitment is testament to the passion and hard work from folk like Rand Waldron and his team. From a UK Public Sector perspective this means that our customers can have a consistent experience across all domains, classifications and leverage cutting edge technologies such as AI on their terms. To reinforce our commitment to serving UK Public Sector in 2020 we invested in a dedicated, sovereign dual-region cloud for use by the UK public sector and authorised partners. Unique to any other hyperscale cloud provider in the UK market this ensures transactional data is always stored on UK soil and, unless otherwise agreed, the Oracle personnel accessing such data are UK citizens that are SC Cleared.?

And our commitment to UK Public Sector is not all about tech, we are committed to supporting UK prosperity aligning with the UK Cabinet Office’s social value model. For example, in support of fighting climate change every Oracle UK Cloud DC’s runs 100% on renewable energy, and to provide Equal Opportunity we are proud to be a government accredited Disability Confident Employer.?

I am looking forward to what the next 4 months and beyond brings! P.S we are hiring - https://www.oracle.com/uk/careers/