At present, digitalization is changing the whole world, and the bottom layer of the digital world is huge and continuously generated, collected, and calculated data. Not only that, with the acceleration of industrial digital transformation, data has become the most important new factor of production, and all scenarios in the future will be driven by data, and the cloud, as the most important digital "base" for thousands of industries, has become a The most powerful platform for carrying data today.
In the process, as the world's largest enterprise-level software company, Oracle is undoubtedly one of the few companies in the world that can achieve "digital-cloud integration" of cloud and data. It is this unique advantage that has allowed Oracle to achieve a substantial increase in performance against the trend.
According to Oracle's fourth-quarter and full-year financial reports for fiscal year 2023, its total revenue for fiscal year 2023 exceeded $50 billion for the first time. Among them, cloud computing revenue (IaaS + SaaS) in the fourth quarter was US$4.4 billion, an increase of 54% in US dollars and 55% in constant exchange rates; cloud infrastructure (IaaS) revenue in the fourth quarter was US$1.4 billion in constant exchange rates An increase of 77%.
More importantly, Oracle has accumulated and accumulated technologies in the cloud and data fields over the years. It has become a leader in generative AI and large models, rapidly reshaping the interaction between people and machines, as well as between people and data in enterprise applications. Today, it can also play a more important role and value.
As Wu Chengyang, vice president of Oracle Corporation and managing director of China, said: "Since entering the Chinese market in 1989, Oracle has been committed to introducing advanced technologies and products into the Chinese market, and has been keeping close to and meeting the needs of Chinese companies. To better serve Chinese industry customers. Now, Oracle China is also fully embracing data and cloud technology, and actively helping companies to better build AI capabilities, hoping to contribute more to the high-quality development of China's economy and the process of dual cycles strength."
Three modes to release AI for greater productivity
Since the beginning of this year, generative AI has opened up a new era of intelligence for human development, detonated a new era of industrial revolution, and at the same time further highlighted the importance of large models. Indeed, the big model is a typical product of the combination of "big data + big computing power + strong algorithm". It is also a "hidden knowledge base" that condenses the inner purification of big data. Its value potential can be said to be very clear.
However, the development of AI will never be limited to the scene of generative AI, and the large model will not be limited to the general large model. Various industries, promoting the intelligent transformation process of the entire industry.
Wu Chengyang, vice president of Oracle Corporation and managing director of China
Wu Chengyang said that Oracle will naturally not "absent" the opportunities brought about by the explosion of generative AI and large models, but Oracle's strategy is different from other competitors. The core is to provide relevant information based on the actual scenarios of enterprises using AI Services, Oracle is currently able to provide three different service models, namely infrastructure, models and services, and "enabling" applications, specifically:
First of all, in the field of infrastructure, Oracle mainly provides powerful infrastructure capabilities for large-scale training and serving models. In this regard, Oracle can be said to have invested "heavy money" to build its own advantages-after years of layout, Oracle currently has 44 OCI regions around the world, and previously announced a further deepened partnership with NVIDIA. Launched a new multi-year cooperation project, which can migrate the complete NVIDIA accelerated computing stack (including GPU, system, software) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Remote Service (OCI), helping enterprises better solve business problems through accelerated computing and artificial intelligence challenge.
In addition, OCI fully supports RDMA. This technology based on remote direct access to memory greatly improves the speed and efficiency of data interaction. Especially with the rise of deep learning and artificial intelligence, it has begun to be widely used in Ethernet environments. Among them, it can provide enterprise customers with a real elastic architecture system.
Secondly, in the field of models and services, Oracle has "deeply cultivated" data for more than 40 years, and it also has the ability to form differentiation. Taking generative AI as an example, Oracle provides customers with easy-to-use cloud technology services in a fully managed environment, and also has good data security, privacy protection and governance capabilities.
It is worth mentioning that Oracle recently announced that it will cooperate with Cohere to provide new generative AI services and business functions. Cohere is a generative AI company that mainly provides enterprise-level large-scale language models (LLM). Oracle will work with Cohere to build new generative AI services. The upcoming OCI Generative AI enables OCI customers to add generative AI capabilities to enterprise applications and workflows through a simple API.
Finally, in the field of "enabling" applications, Oracle is also actively embedding generative AI models into the applications and workflows that business users use every day. For example, in Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, new capabilities based on generative AI have been added. Powered by Oracle OCI Generative AI Services, the new capabilities are built into existing human resources (HR) processes to accelerate business value, increase productivity, improve the candidate and employee experience, and streamline HR processes. Not only that, but with the help of Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, customers can also use their own data to optimize the model to meet specific business needs.
In fact, from the perspective of the most basic "computing power + data + algorithm" required by generative AI and large models, large models require a very large scale of computing power and high performance requirements; Mining, constructing, screening, and cleaning these data itself is a huge project; at the same time, due to the huge parameters, the training of large models is difficult and expensive. In this field, Oracle has established its own capabilities and advantages, which have not only been verified in the industry's implementation and practice, but also can empower industry customers with three different service models. I believe it will also help more in the future. Many industry customers "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create differentiated competitiveness.
Flexible choices to drive data to generate new value
We know that the country has previously defined data as a new "factor of production", especially when large-scale data is deeply applied in various traditional industries, which will undoubtedly promote profound changes in production methods, business models, and management paradigms in various industries. change. How to play or release the role of data as a new "factor of production" is the core of database technology innovation behind it is very important.
Especially for many large and medium-sized enterprises today, on the one hand, their core business systems run on powerful centralized commercial databases; High requirements, while facing the system pressure brought by high concurrent business and large number of users, for this reason, enterprise customers have also begun to try distributed databases to solve the new pressure brought by the explosion of data. But a new problem also arises from this, that is, how to better manage two or more database systems at the same time?
In this context, Oracle's application-level database dual-plane solution "emerged as the times require", which can help enterprises provide comprehensive and predictable business support capabilities.
Li Jia, Senior Director of Technical Consulting Department, Oracle China
In the view of Li Jia, Senior Director of Technical Consulting Department of Oracle Corporation in China: "Database is the core link of the entire application system, and high availability and business stability are the top priorities, especially when there are many kinds of databases that enterprises need to manage. Oracle has always been thinking about how to maximize the high availability of the entire platform, and Oracle's application-level database dual-plane solution is created for Chinese users and application scenarios."
It is understood that Oracle's application-level database dual-plane solution is based on the Oracle GoldenGate technology architecture, which can provide real-time, log-based change data capture and delivery between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. The biggest feature of this architecture is that it can support a Multiple data replication topologies such as many-to-many, many-to-many, cascaded, bi-directional, and moreover, its diverse use cases include real-time business intelligence; query offload; zero-downtime upgrades and migrations; and active-active databases for data Distribution, data synchronization and high availability.
"Oracle GoldenGate's technical architecture capabilities have been verified in the industry through a lot of practice. Currently, it can support more than a thousand data sources. At the same time, it can provide support on and off the cloud. It can be said to be a very mature technical solution." Li Jia said.
On this basis, Oracle also maintains continuous iterations and updates in the database field to help customers solve more problems with the latest technical capabilities. Taking Oracle Database 23c (App Simple) as an example, it has many new functions, such as "True Cache", which can provide a high-performance in-memory cache that is always consistent with the database, which can make the response speed of the application faster. Fast, and reduces the workload of the database server, it can play a unique value in application caching, edge caching, regional caching or multi-cloud caching environment.
Another example is JSON Relational Duality. Oracle Database 23c supports enterprise users to transparently access and update data in the form of JSON documents or relational tables. ORM) is simpler and more powerful, allowing developers to implement application development in a more simplified way; at the same time, Oracle Database 23c also supports RAC on K8s & Podman, which can help users achieve better persistence in the Kubernetes environment Data support; In addition, Oracle Database 23c also adds the "SQL Firewall" capability, which can provide real-time protection against common database attacks by monitoring and blocking unauthorized SQL and SQL injection attacks.
In fact, the new functions of Oracle Database 23c and above are just "a glimpse of the leopard". As the world's most advanced new version of the fusion database, it supports all data types, workloads and development styles. It can be said that it truly defines the development of the next-generation database. trend.
And Wu Chengyang also emphasized: "China has always been a very important market for Oracle, there is no doubt about it. Therefore, our technology, products and technological innovation are completely synchronized with the world, and there is no such thing as a 'castrated version'. , now Chinese users can also use Oracle's latest Oracle database 23c; at the same time, the needs of Chinese users are also the direction of Oracle's efforts. Now industry users are willing to use two databases, and even hope to use three databases: Oracle database , open-source databases, and domestic databases. There is no problem with these, and Oracle helps users achieve the stability of the entire system by launching an application-level database dual-plane solution.”
It can be seen that, behind Oracle's constant insistence on technological innovation and "practicing words with deeds" in the database field, it is the concrete embodiment of its continuous evolution and iteration following the changes of the times, and it is also the truth of its constant "listening to users" feedback This kind of continuous forward-looking, innovative and product power is believed to not only help more Chinese companies release more data value dividends, but also play the role of "Mr. Key" in the future-oriented digital transformation of enterprises. "character of.
Powerful base, escorting enterprises going overseas
In the past few years, driven by digital technology, more and more Chinese enterprises are accelerating the pace of overseas business expansion, and the road of "going out" is getting wider and wider. According to the report of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade Research Institute in March 2022, China's foreign direct investment flow and stock have been ranked among the top three in the world for four consecutive years; the report also shows that nearly 80% of Chinese companies will maintain and expand foreign investment intentions, and they are optimistic about the prospects for foreign investment.
Similarly, in the field of Chinese enterprises going overseas, Oracle also hopes to use Oracle Cloud to build a technical "base" for the global development of enterprises, and to "escort" Chinese enterprises going overseas through wider regional coverage, safer compliance, and higher cost performance. China's economy has achieved "dual cycle" development.
Ji Xiaofeng, Senior Director of Technical Consulting Department of Oracle Corporation China
According to Ji Xiaofeng, senior director of Oracle Technology Consulting Department in China, in order to achieve this goal, Oracle Cloud has also made innovations in three aspects "adapted to local conditions", hoping to build a security cooperation platform for more Chinese companies to go global. The standard and reliable cloud "base".
First, in terms of new regions, Oracle Cloud has currently deployed 44 cloud regions around the world, and the number of "Regions" will continue to grow in the future. In the future, Oracle will continue to follow the model of "one country, two cloud regions". Let enterprises get a consistent experience no matter where they expand their users.
Ji Xiaofeng said: "The advantage of the Oracle cloud regional model is that it is close to end users and guarantees user experience; now enterprises attach great importance to data security and compliance, and many countries have requirements that sensitive data cannot leave the country, and Oracle can well meet the requirements. Compliance requirements; at the same time, this model can also play a disaster recovery role to maximize business continuity. In order to meet the multi-cloud needs of customers, Oracle and Microsoft Azure have established high-speed Interconnection can achieve millisecond-level network delays, and the interconnection between the two parties does not require enterprises to pay for dedicated lines, and it can also bring extremely high cost-effective advantages to enterprises."
Second, in terms of new models, in order to help enterprises balance price and performance in their cloud environment and reduce usage costs, Oracle Cloud has also launched a new OCI Compute E5 instance using the fourth-generation AMD EPYC processor. Unlike the fixed instance options of other public cloud service providers, OCI's flexible instances support enterprise customers to "allocate" cores and memory on demand, without paying additional fees for unused resources.
OCI Compute E5 provides three instance types, namely OCI Compute E5 standard instance; OCI Compute E5 HPC instance and OCI Compute E5 intensive IO instance. Customers of these instances can flexibly choose the number of cores, memory, local and remote storage, and network and other resources to support a variety of workloads faster and more efficiently. Likewise, these instances give customers the flexibility and simplicity to run a wide variety of workloads, including applications from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, other third-party ISVs, and VMware and Kubernetes environments.
Third, in terms of new services, Oracle launched "MySQL Heatwave Lakehouse", a new service that allows users to query data in object storage as quickly as they query data in a database. MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse supports multiple file formats (such as CSV, Parquet, etc.) and files exported from other databases, and can combine object storage file data with data in MySQL databases in the same query.
Specifically, data in object storage is queried directly by HeatWave without copying the data into a MySQL database. As a result, MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse sets new scalability and performance standards for query processing, data loading speed, cluster provisioning time, and automation when it comes to querying data in object storage.
"The core of MySQL Heatwave Lakehouse is that Oracle has made a perfect combination of data in object storage and Heatwave. Heatwave LakeHouse can be expanded to 512 nodes, supporting a data capacity of about 500TB. At the same time, all its operations are in memory. And the whole architecture is also highly parallelized, which makes the query speed of users very fast." Ji Xiaofeng said.
It can be seen that as Oracle Cloud becomes more and more competitive, more and more Chinese enterprises have begun to deploy key services to OCI. Hisense Group has achieved continuous growth in overseas business by adopting OCI's services. At present, Hisense Group has migrated 9 overseas key business systems to OCI technology applications, helping its overseas enterprises apply to the cloud and improving user experience in an all-round way. Similarly, Mobwang also chose OCI to provide cloud platform technology and service support for the global layout of its AIGC SaaS digital human and AI voice technology, continue to promote the innovation and development of artificial intelligence technology and applications, and accelerate the construction of a new ecology of the virtual world .
In this regard, Wu Chengyang said that the "dual engines" of cloud and data built by Oracle today can not only better help enterprises realize digital and intelligent transformation, but also allow Oracle to open up the future "ascent channel"; while in the Chinese market , Oracle will also uphold the innovation gene, take root in the Chinese market, and bring more advanced technologies to Chinese companies.
"Today, Oracle is able to provide China with a full range of database and cloud services. For example, Oracle still provides licensed database services. At the same time, we also have Oracle Exadata proprietary cloud database all-in-one machine (ExaCC), which can use its unique innovative technology advantages, Help companies build a solid private cloud foundation; and in the overseas market of Chinese companies, although Oracle is a latecomer, the current market for Chinese companies going overseas is already big enough, much larger than everyone imagined, and even far larger than the Chinese database market It is much larger. Therefore, the business of Chinese companies going overseas has provided Oracle with enough market space. Whether the company is going to the Southeast Asian market, Mexico, or any other place in the world that it wants to go, Oracle can provide all-round support and services." Wu Chengyang finally said.
In general, China’s current digital economy centered on digital industrialization and industrial digitization is accelerating in an all-round way. "Running" in a powerful cloud base can release more powerful new capabilities, and the "dual engines" of cloud and data built by Oracle can not only provide new momentum for the digital transformation and upgrading of Chinese enterprises, but also It can drive and lead China's digital economy to a broader new future.
Oracle CloudWorld will be held in Las Vegas from September 18th to 21st, 2023 (US time). Big names gather and ideas collide, so stay tuned.
For more details, please click "Read the original text, or follow the Oracle Global Cloud Conference event page (https://www.oracle.com/cloudworld/ ) or the WeChat public account of Oracle China/Oracle China Market Events.
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Shenyao's Science and Technology Observation was founded by a senior technology media person, Shenski, who has 20 years of experience in dissemination of enterprise-level technology content. He has long focused on the observation and thinking of industrial Internet, enterprise digitalization, ICT infrastructure, and automotive technology.
