Oracle CloudWorld 2024: Embracing Multi-Cloud, Nuclear Energy, and Other Event Highlights

Led by CEO Safra Catz and CTO Larry Ellison, Oracle’s annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas found the company looking back to its 47-year past and ahead to the future.

Executives from the Texas-based tech giant made a compelling, sometimes theatrical case for why Oracle’s history has positioned the firm at the forefront of the AI boom while envisioning a future of enhanced productivity, security, and innovation.

Among announcements of new partnerships, applications, and functionality, CloudWorld 2024 was also a hub of futuristic thinking, presenting a portrait of a company – and a digital infrastructure industry – at an inflection point.

Here are the key highlights from Oracle CloudWorld 2024:

Q1 Earnings Boost Accelerated by AI Integration

In over 120 sessions hosted at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, more than a few CloudWorld panel moderators pivoted from their introductory remarks to interviews with corporate customers by saying some form of, “Well, don’t take my word for it.”

But even before the frenetic conference hall muzak played, and before Catz emerged to speak to a packed audience, Oracle contextualized its conference with a strong first-quarter balance sheet. Revenues for the company rose 21% to $5.6 billion during the period. Net income totaled $2.93 billion, up on the $2.42 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

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Interestingly, the earnings report itself became an advertisement for the company’s AI functionality. As Steve Miranda, Oracle’s executive vice president of app development highlighted, what was notable wasn’t just Oracle’s revenue and growth, but how quickly the company was able to parse and present its Q1 data – just nine days after the quarter ended. This, Miranda said, was thanks to AI, which gives the company visibility on its data throughout the quarter.

Oracle CloudWorld 2024 took place at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, Las Vegas.

Nuclear Power in the AI Age

Ellison made one of Oracle’s biggest headlines of the week with his Monday earnings call announcement the company would invest in three small nuclear reactors to power a data center with over 1 GW of AI capacity. Although his keynote address at CloudWorld didn’t provide any additional details, Ellison said that while Oracle now runs over 162 data centers globally, they could soon be operating over 1,000 facilities.

“Alternative energy sources are crucial to their success,” Kevin Sullivan, Global and US Oracle Alliance Practice Leader at Pricewaterhousecoopers, told Data Center Knowledge. “Nuclear, on a personal level, makes me a little nervous. Other alternative energy sources might be better options. But all options need to be available.”

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Sullivan, whose team at PwC was awarded the ‘2024 Oracle Global Service Partner Applications Award in Customer Success’, hosted a panel of his own on the transformative power of AI and started by citing the fact that 73% of US companies already have embarked on an AI strategy. That will mean finding a way to meet the energy demands posed by this booming industry. “This is real,” he said. “This is here to stay.”

The Multi-Cloud Era is One of Partnerships

On the heels of the announcement that Oracle was partnering with AWS, Catz and Ellison presented a vision of prioritizing customer choice and an ethos of compatibility between platforms and applications over strict self-interest.

“Many of our longtime rivals are now our partners,” Catz said of Microsoft, Google, and AWS. She framed these partnerships as a return to the company’s roots, recalling how CloudWorld was originally called OpenWorld. “Remember?” she said, “We built our technology so you, our customers, could run it anywhere you want.”

Ellison elaborated on this point. In the company’s early days, he said, customers had a lot of choice. But in the cloud era, “We lost the idea that customers could buy technology from many different companies… [but now] services on different clouds can work gracefully together. The clouds are no longer walled gardens.”

Related:A History of Google Cloud and Data Center Outages

‘The Cyber Wars Are Getting Worse’

CloudWorld 2024 highlighted the year-over-year rise of cyber-attacks and posted the question: “How can we, as an industry, use AI to dramatically improve cloud security?” The answer, at least from Ellison, provided some of the most evocative images at the event.

Standing in front of the words, “No Human Labor – No Human Error,” the Oracle co-founder claimed that most cyber-attacks begin with human error, and described the company’s shift toward purely AI-generated code to eliminate security vulnerabilities.

The executive also predicted in his keynote that Oracle employees a year from now would access systems purely using biometric data. He said, “Why are you asking me for a password? Passwords are obsolete.” Michelle Zatlin, co-founder of Cloudfare, emphasized the importance of AI in stopping cyber-attacks, claiming that over 100 million attacks had been stopped using AI, while acknowledging, “It’s not getting safer out there.”

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