Oracle has a crack at ending the idea of employees

Oracle is making all the right noises ahead of Mobile World Congress with an aggressive expansion in data centre assets, a virtual assistant and a broader offering across its autonomous product portfolio.

In October the team launched what it claimed was the world’s first autonomous database cloud and today’s announcement spreads the AI features to the rest of the Oracle world. The cloud database, naughtily known as 18c, was claimed to eliminate the human labour associated with tuning, patching, updating and maintaining the database, and now the team are taking these capabilities to the rest of developer cloud platform.

“The future of tomorrow’s successful enterprise IT organization is in full end-to-end automation,” said Oracle President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. “At Oracle, we are making this a reality. We are weaving autonomous capabilities into the fabric of our cloud to help customers safeguard their systems, drive innovation faster, and deliver the ultimate competitive advantage with smarter real-time decisions.”

While most companies will preach about the importance of their employees they are in fact the biggest burden on the spreadsheets. Humans make errors, need rest, get ill and cost a lot of money, Oracle is offering a solution to executives who want to be more profitable; use our products and get rid of some of your employees. And while this might sound very doom and gloom, it should come as very little surprise.

Technology is all about efficiency, productivity and performance; the promise is to enhance these metrics in your organization. Efficiency means spending less, productivity means doing more, or having a smaller number of people do a greater share of the jobs and performance means doing better. Automated cloud ensures that you tick all three boxes. Jobs are done quicker, less people are paid to do them and generally they are done better. Efficiency, productivity and performance gains mean less people involved.

Examples of the new automated products include automated application development (artifact discovery, dependency management, and policy-based dependency updates), self-learning chatbots, self-defining application and data integration for business process management tools, automated data discovery, preparation and analysis, user and entity behaviour analytics to automatically isolate and eliminate threats to the organization. It certainly is quite a comprehensive list.

To top it all off, Oracle has also introduced a digital assistant to converse across the user’s CRM, ERP, HCM, custom applications and business intelligence data. The assistant is also laden with machine learning algorithms to correlate data and automate user behaviour. It’s automation at its finest and scariest. What’s the point in having a workforce when Oracle’s software can do it all for you.

To complete the announcement, Oracle has also announced that it will be expanding its data centre footprint quite dramatically. 12 new data centre regions will be available across the world offering the full suite of Oracle software.

“The future of IT is autonomous. With our expanded, modern data centres, Oracle is uniquely suited to deliver the most autonomous technologies in the world,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “As we invest, our margins will continue to expand. And with our global data centre expansion, we are able to help customers lower IT costs, mitigate risks and compete like they never have before.”

In Asia the new assets will be in China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea, and Amsterdam and Switzerland in Europe. Two new regions will be opened in Canada and two new US locations will be added to support US Department of Defence workloads.