I was onstage at 08:00 with copresenters Craig Oxby and Alan Petrie from Heathrow Airport and Andrew Frater from Dunnhumby.  It is notable that all of my co-presenters mentioned getting FAW up and running in a couple to a few months.  No-one seems stuck.  

Everyone’s themes were similar.  Moving data into excel or screenshotting into Powerpoint causes mistrust of data.   Everyone wants to see the briefing directly from the system. 

Oracle announced Customer Success Services (CSS).  CSS means Oracle is getting more involved in consulting again.  This was a huge part of what Oracle did in the Ray Lane era.  Oracle backed away from it because of channel conflict but there seems to be a renewed emphasis on ownership of customer success.  

Notable that Oracle includes AI at the same level as “technology” in the taxonomy of Oracle offerings. When we were here last year, the character of what Oracle was delivering was not changed massively from 10 years ago.  This year it was very noticeable that AI pervades everything. Very different in one year. 

Very interesting comment from Vodafone, doing theme extraction from chats and interaction.  Not new.  Consistent with other approaches that I have seen and something of obvious value.  

Interesting comment from Michelin on “connected tires”.  An IOT idea that had not occurred to me. 

AI is a big theme.  Steve made a great point about not using apps data for training the AI.  It is using public LLM interfaces for things like

• Customer Service response.

• Employee appraisal.

• Automate item description 

• Create finance narrative. 

He did note that they are using time and effort spent in edit as a learning metric, to know how well their “Onboard AI” is doing. 

The keynote was very demo oriented.

Nokia gave the first customer segment with HR go live.  85,000 people.  

The implementation was largely focused on Process improvement. 

The use of Gen AI is mostly in digital assistants. 

Steve then gave the Supply Chain pitch with a big emphasis on migration of eBusiness Suite and JDEdwards to cloud. 

LEMO Gave the customer pitch for supply chain. They had a big emphasis on both process and data harmonization. 

It was really interesting to hear Andrew New talk about what he expects to get out of his applications deployment.  While “Bottom Line” might have been in the title of the session, Andrew spoke about. 

• On time On Quantity delivery (perfect order)

• Cost of care

• Patient Outcomes measured through Rate of Readmittance

Andrew also spoke about sharing the inventory risk down the supply chain .  He was making the point that we manage resilience by holding lots of inventory as safety stock.  If we can share forecast we can replace some of that inventory with information.  The automotive supply chain is very good at this and makes forecasts progressively more certain as you move from a planning schedule (EDI 830) to a Shipping Schedule (EDI 862) to a Sequenced Schedule (EDI 866)

My sense was that there were many more analytics flavoured sessions in this year’s Cloudworld than last year.  Rich Clayton gave the Analytics directions 

There are many themes in Oracle’s rich heritage of Analytics Applications that are now characterized as AI / ML models.

However, Rich did a demo of a conversational sidebar in the  analytics UI, that helped you drill in to relevant detail.  I was so absorbed by the demo that I did not get a photo.  It was the first time that I have been able to visualize a “Conversation as User Interface” in analytics.  I thought it was very natural and productive andI have not seen things like it before. 

This was a session from Paul Irons, Director, IT, NatWest Group, who was making the point that forcing people to move off the tools they are currently using was a bit futile.  However, getting them to all use the same data source for reporting had been a big win. 

The database session was focused on holding different types of data in the Oracle database, so as not to fragment relational data in one technology and graph data in another and document data in yet another. Jenny’s session showed the change in SQL syntax to interact with these different types.  The session feels very low key but very significant.