Oracle pitches autonomous capabilities for its entire cloud platform

Oracle is raising its bid to attract enterprises moving to the cloud  by extending AI-based automation throughout its PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, claiming that the new automated services will cut costs and reduce management headaches.

The company is using AI techniques including machine learning to enable the various services in its Oracle Cloud Platform to do self-maintenance, such as optimizing workloads and installing patches.

The basic pitch to CIOs is straightforward. “It’s really reducing costs and increasing productivity — that’s what we’re aiming for, where CIOs can really take care of focusing their resources and investment on strategic initiatives and have the services run by Oracle be very self-running,” said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of product development for the Oracle Cloud Platform.

“We want to provide autonomous capabilities to eliminate the human labor associated with provisioning, upgrades, backup, recovery, and troubleshooting,” Zavery said.

This sort of automation is key to how Oracle is trying to differentiate itself from  competitors like Amazon and Microsoft that have a longer history in the cloud, not to mention much bigger market share.

Last October at its OpenWorld conference, Oracle announced its Autonomous Database Cloud, powered by Oracle Database 18c. Over the next few months, the self-tuning features of 18c will be brought across Oracle‘s entire cloud platform, the company announced at its CloudWorld event in New York Monday.

To a certain extent, users have for some time expected cloud providers to do some patching and provisioning as part of basic services. But Zavery points out that PaaS services in particular still require a lot of human intervention and manual management. “A lot of patching doesn’t happen automatically and a lot of systems don’t get upgraded regularly,” Zavery said.

Meanwhile, machine learning and various automated services are being added to enhance specific functions provided by Oracle‘s PaaS applications development, application and data integration, analytics and security services.

Application development services will include chatbot technology designed to help developers apply chatbots to their applications. Oracle has modeled a variety of different chatbot use cases so developers don’t have to start from scratch, and has incorporated machine learning into the software so that the chatbots, through usage, get better at understanding what users intend to do on a website. Developer services also include automated identification and remediation of security issues in code.

New application and data integration capabilities have been designed to automate the flow of data, with data prep pipeline and data lake creation.