5 OpenWorld Announcements that show Oracle's Multi-Cloud Future

Another Oracle OpenWorld conference has just completed in San Francisco, it's 40th year and with over 60,000 attendees it's the largest tech conference of its kind. This year however was quite different to most - with some announcements that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago:

Oracle & Microsoft have Connected their Clouds:

As I wrote about previously, Oracle and Microsoft are now linking up their data centers to give customers one single console to build applications in the Cloud with the best of both worlds from Microsoft & Oracle together. The 2nd interconnected region is already live in London - with several more coming soon. In fact. Larry announced we are going to be Opening 20 new data center regions in the next 18 months - that's a new one every 23 days - incredibly we will have more than AWS by this time next year!! The reception of this partnership has been remarkable and I am now working directly with Microsoft on some exciting new plans, with a select group of Multi-Cloud Partners to take this proposition to customers together.

Oracle now Supports VMware

In another unprecedented move, old rivals Oracle and VMWare have also entered into a Partnership. Now Oracle is going to Support VMware environments in OCI - they get a certified solution of VMware running on the Oracle cloud with full integration and support.

As Multi-Cloud strategies have been taking off, Hybrid Cloud strategies in the enterprise have been maturing. Customers can now solidify their Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud plans with confidence.

Always Free Autonomous Database and Cloud Infrastructure

I've worked in Oracle for over 10 years and this one shocked me the most! Never in my time have Oracle ever given anything away for free! But here it is and it's fantastic news for everyone: The Always Free Autonomous Database Tier. You get 2x Autonomous Databases, 2x VM's, storage, network and all the services you need. Perfect for any test and dev - and ask long as you keep using it - it never expires!

Oracle is becoming a Cloud Powerhouse with its Autonomous Database - and Larry is betting the future is Autonomous. Multi-Cloud is about giving the customer the option to chose the best individual solution for the task in hand. Customers can now get full access to the Autonomous Database and everything else they need to evaluate and prove the groundbreaking technology.

Multi-Cloud Security

Organisations choose to implement a multi-cloud strategy for many reasons: to enable flexible distribution of workloads, increase security, improve reliability and of course, to reduce costs. A well-designed multi-cloud strategy decreases the effectiveness of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by allowing IT and security teams to shift the workloads to other cloud environments.

Oracle's Autonomous Database extends this further as it eliminates human error, network errors or even server or software failures - the system just keeps running. Larry says "We are at Least 25x more reliable than Amazon" which is a big claim! “In the Oracle Autonomous Cloud, when you use the Oracle Autonomous Database it configures itself. It's not possible for customers to make configuration errors because there are no pilots to make errors.”

New Partner Program

Oracle also just released details of a Ground-up Overhaul of the Partner Program called OPN 2020. The new partner program lets partners mature on different tracks depending on what their focus is - Build, Sell or Service - and gain certifications to prove their abilities. OPN will have one tier but almost 50 new badges that attest to partner skills in delivering specific cloud products and business outcomes, as well as geographic reach, relevant experience and industry alignment—what customers have told Oracle they really care about.

Also here in the Multi-Cloud team, we are on-boarding new Multi-Cloud Specialist Partners across EMEA to help our customers who are Multi-Cloud and want to migrate their Oracle to the Cloud also. We are looking for a small number of strategic partners who want to expand their reach to include Oracle Cloud as part of the portfolio of vendor-agnostic services that they offer to their customers. Our team and network of partners is growing fast with some new and exciting announcements still to come. If you want to be part of this journey with us, please get in touch.

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