Oracle University Podcast

Oracle Corporation

Oracle University Podcast delivers convenient, foundational training on popular Oracle technologies such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Java, Autonomous Database, and more to help you jump-start or advance your career in the cloud.

  1. 1D AGO

    Getting Started with Oracle Database@AWS

    If you've ever wondered how Oracle Database really works inside AWS, this episode will finally turn the lights on.   Join Senior Principal OCI Instructor Susan Jang as she explains the two database services available (Exadata Database Service and Autonomous Database), how Oracle and AWS share responsibilities behind the scenes, and which essential tasks still land on your plate after deployment.   You'll discover how automation, scaling, and security actually work, and which model best fits your needs, whether you want hands-off simplicity or deeper control.   Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-databaseaws-architect-professional/155574 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26   Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University.  Nikita: Hi everyone! In our last episode, we began the discussion on Oracle Database@AWS. Today, we're diving deeper into the database services that are available in this environment. Susan Jang, our Senior Principal OCI Instructor, joins us once again.  00:56 Lois: Hi Susan! Thanks for being here today. In our last conversation, we compared Oracle Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Service. Can you elaborate on the fundamental differences between these two services?     Susan: Now, the primary difference is between the service is really the management model. The Autonomous is fully-managed by Oracle, while the Exadata provides flexibility for you to have the ability to customize your database environment while still having the infrastructure be managed by Oracle.   01:30 Nikita: When it comes to running Oracle Database@AWS, how do Oracle and AWS each chip in? Could you break down what each provider is responsible for in this setup?  Susan: Oracle Database@AWS is a collaboration between Oracle, as well as AWS. It allows the customer to deploy and run Oracle Database services, including the Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle Exadata Database Service directly in AWS data centers.   Oracle provides the ability of having the Oracle Exadata Database Service on a dedicated infrastructure. This service delivers full capabilities of Oracle Exadata Database on the Oracle Exadata hardware. It offers high performance and high security for demanding workloads. It has cloud automation, resource scaling, and performance optimization to simplify the management of the service.  Oracle Autonomous Database on the dedicated Exadata infrastructure provides a fully Autonomous Database on this dedicated infrastructure within AWS. It automates the database management tasks, including patching, backups, as well as tuning, and have built-in AI capabilities for developing AI-powered applications and interacting with data using natural language. The Oracle Database@AWS integrates those core database services with various AWS services for a comprehensive unified experience.  AWS provides the ability of having a cloud-based object storage, and that would be the Amazon S3. You also have the ability to have other services, such as the Amazon CloudWatch. It monitors the database metrics, as well as performance. You also have Amazon Bedrock. It provides a development environment for a generative AI application.   And last but not the least, amongst the many other services, you also have the SageMaker. This is a cloud-based platform for development of machine learning models, a wonderful integration with our AI application development needs.  03:54 Lois: How has the work involved in setting up and managing databases changed over time?  Susan: When we take a look at the evolution of how things have changed through the years in our systems, we realize that transfer responsibility has now been migrated more from customer or human interaction to services. As the database technology evolves from the traditional on-premise system to the Exadata engineered system, and finally to the Autonomous Database, certain services previously requiring significant manual intervention has become increasingly automated, as well as optimized.  04:34 Lois: How so?  Susan: When we take a look at the more traditional database environment, it requires manual configuration of hardware, operating system, as well as the software of the database, along with initial database creation. As we evolve into the Exadata environment, the Exadata Database, specifically the Exadata cloud service, simplifies provisioning through web-based wizard, making it faster and easier to deploy the Oracle Database in an optimized hardware.     But when we move it to an Autonomous environment, it automates the entire provisioning process, allowing users to rapidly deploy mission-critical databases without manual intervention, or DBA involvement. So as customers move toward Autonomous Database through Exadata, we have fewer components that the customer needs to manage in the database stack, which gives them more time to focus more on important parts of the business.  With the Exadata Database, it provides a co-management of backup, restore, patches and upgrade, monitoring, and tuning. And it allows the administrator the ability to customize the configuration to meet their very specific business needs. With Autonomous Database, it's now fully automated and it's a greater responsibility is shift toward the service. With Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure, it provides that fine-grained tuning more for Oracle to help you perform that task.  06:15 Nikita: If we narrow it down just to Oracle and AWS for a moment, which parts of the infrastructure or day-to-day ops are handled by each company behind the scenes?  Susan: When we take a look at Oracle Database@AWS, it operates under a shared responsibility model, dividing the service responsibilities between AWS, as well as Oracle, as well as you, the customer.   The AWS has the data center. Remember, this is where everything is running. The Oracle Database@AWS, the Oracle Database infrastructure may be managed by Oracle and run in OCI, but is physically located within the AWS regions, as well as the availability zones and the AWS data centers.  The AWS infrastructure, in this case, is AWS's responsibility to secure the environment, including the physical security of the data center, the network infrastructure, and the foundational services like the compute, the storage, and the networking, all within AWS.  The next thing of who's responsible for the shared responsibility, it's Oracle. And that would be the hardware. We provide the hardware. While the hardware may physically reside in the AWS data center, Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure operational team will be the one managing this infrastructure, including software patching, infrastructure update, and other operations through a connection to OCI. This means Oracle handles the provisioning, as well as the maintenance of any of the underlying Exadata infrastructure hardware.  When we take a look at the next thing that it manages, it is also responsible besides the infrastructure of the Exadata. It is also the ability to manage the hardware, the environment of that hardware through the database control plane. So Oracle manages the administration and the operational for the Oracle Database@AWS service, which resides in OCI. So this includes the capabilities for management, upgrade, and operational features.  08:37 Nikita: And what are the key things that still remain on the customer's plate?   Susan: If you are in an Exadata environment or in an Autonomous environment, it is you, the customer, who is responsible for most of the database administration operation, as well as managing the users and the privileges of the user to access the database. No one knows the database and who should be accessing the data better than you.  You will be responsible for securing the applications, the data of the database, which now allows you to define who has access to it, control the data encryption, and securing the application that interacts with the Oracle Database@AWS.  09:29 Lois: Susan, we've talked about both Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Service being available on Oracle Database@AWS, but what's different about how each works in this environment, and why might someone pick one over the other?  Susan: Both databases, even though they run on the same Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, both can be deployed on both public cloud, as well as the customer data center, which is Oracle Cloud@Customer.  The Autonomous Database is a fully managed, completely automated environment. And this provides a capability of having a fully Autonomous Database Service running on a dedicated Oracle Exadata Infrastructure within your AWS data center.  The Exadata is a service that is provided and managed by Oracle and is physically running in the AWS data center, but is designed for mission critical workload and includes RAC environment, Real Application Cluster, offering a high performance availability and full feature capability that is similar to other Exadata environment, such as those running in our customers' data center.  The primary difference is really between

    24 min

  2. FEB 10

    What is Oracle Database@AWS?

    In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham take you inside how Oracle brings its industry-leading database technology directly to AWS customers.   Senior Principal OCI Instructor Susan Jang unpacks what the OCI child site is, how Exadata hardware is deployed inside AWS data centers, and how the ODB network enables secure, low-latency connections so your mission-critical workloads can run seamlessly alongside AWS services.   Susan also walks through the differences between Exadata Database Service and Autonomous Database, helping teams choose the right level of control and automation for their cloud databases.   Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-databaseaws-architect-professional/155574 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services.  Lois: Hi there! Last week, we talked about multicloud and the partnerships Oracle has with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. If you missed that episode, do listen to it as it sets the foundation for today's discussion, which is going to be about Oracle Database@AWS.  00:59 Nikita: That's right. And we're joined by Susan Jang, a Senior Principal OCI Instructor. Susan, thanks for being here. To start us off, what is Oracle Database@AWS?  Susan: Oracle Database@AWS is a service that allows Oracle Exadata infrastructure that is managed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, to run directly inside an AWS data center.   01:25 Lois: Susan, can you go through the key architecture components and networking relationships involved in this?    Susan: The AWS Cloud is the Amazon Web Service. It's a cloud computing platform. The AWS region is a distinct, isolated geographic location with multiple physically separated data center, also known as availability zone. The availability zone is really a physically isolated data center with its own independent power, cooling, and network connectivity.  When we speak of the AWS data center, it's a highly secured, specialized physical facility that houses the computing storage, the compute servers, the storage server, and the networking equipment. The VPC, the Virtual Private Cloud, is a logical, isolated virtual network.  The AWS ODB network is a private user-created network that connects the virtual private cloud network of Amazon resources with an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Exadata system. This is all within an AWS data center. The AWS-ADB peering is really an established private network connection that's between the Oracle VPC, the Virtual Private Cloud, and the Oracle Database@AWS network. And that would be the ODB.  Within the AWS data center, you have something that you see called the child site. Now, an OCI child site is really a physical data center that is managed by Oracle within the AWS data center. It's a seamless extension of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The site is hosting the Exadata infrastructure that's running the Oracle databases.  The Oracle Database@AWS service brings the power as well as the performance of an Oracle Exadata infrastructure that is managed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run directly in an AWS data center.  03:57 Nikita: So essentially, Oracle Database@AWS lets you to run your mission-critical Oracle data load close to your AWS application, while keeping management simple. Susan, what advantages does Oracle Database@AWS bring to the table?  Susan: Oracle Database@AWS offers a powerful and flexible solution for running Oracle workloads natively within AWS. Oracle Database@AWS streamlines the process of moving your existing Oracle Database to AWS, making migration faster as well as easier.  You get direct, low latency connectivity between your application and Oracle databases, ensuring a high performance for your mission-critical workloads.   Billing, resource management, and operational tasks are unified, allowing you to manage everything through similar tools with reduce complexity. And finally, Oracle Database@AWS is designed to integrate smoothly with your AWS environments' workloads, making it so much easier to build, deploy, and scale your solutions.  05:15 Lois: You mentioned the OCI child site earlier. What part does it play in how Oracle Database@AWS works?   Susan: The OCI child site really gives you the capability to combine the physical proximity and resources of AWS with the logical management and the capability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This integrated approach allows us to enable the ability for you to run and manage your Oracle databases seamlessly in your AWS environment while still leveraging the power of OCI, our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  06:03 Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for subscribers! Whether you're interested in multicloud, databases, networking, security, AI, or machine learning, there's something for everyone. So, what are you waiting for? Pick your topic and get started by visiting mylearn.oracle.com.   06:29 Nikita: Welcome back! Susan, I'm curious about the Exadata infrastructure inside AWS. What does that setup look like?  Susan: The Exadata Infrastructure consists of physical database, as well as storage servers. That is deployed-- the database and the storage servers are interconnected using a high-speed, low-latency network fiber, ensuring optimal performance and reliable data transfer.  Each of the database server runs one or more Virtual Machines, or VMs, as we refer to them, providing flexible compute resources for different workloads. You can create, as well as manage your virtual machine, your VM clusters in this infrastructure using various methods. Your AWS console, Command-Line Interface, CLI, or Application Program Interface, that's your API, giving you various options, several options for automating, as well as integrating your existing tools.  When you're creating your Exadata Infrastructure, there are a few things you need to define and set up. You need to define the total number of your database servers, the total number of your storage server, the model of your Exadata system, as well as the availability zone where all these resources will be deployed.  This architecture delivers a high-performance resiliency and flexible management capability for running your Oracle Database on AWS.  08:18 Lois: Susan, can you explain the network architecture for Oracle Database deployments on AWS?   Susan: The ODB network is an isolated network within the AWS that is designed specifically for Exadata deployments. It includes both the client, as well as the backup subnet, which are essential for securing and efficient database operations.  When you create your Exadata Infrastructure, you need to specify the ODB network as you need the connectivity. This network is mapped directly to the corresponding network in the OCI child site. This will enable seamless communication between AWS, as well as the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  The ODB network requires two separate CIDR ranges. And in addition, the client subnet is used for the Exadata VM cluster, providing connectivity for database operations. Well, you do also have another subnet. And that subnet is the backup subnet. And it's used to manage database backups of those VM cluster, ensuring not only data protection, but also data recovery.  Within your AWS region and availability zone, the ODB network contains these dedicated client, as well as backup subnet. It basically isolates the Exadata traffic for both the day-to-day access, and that would be for the client, as well as the backup operations, and that would be for the backup subnet. This network design supports secure, high performance, and connectivity in a reliable backup management of the Oracle Database deployments that is running on AWS.  10:23 Nikita: Since we're on the topic of networking, can you tell us about ODB peering within the Oracle Database architecture?  Susan: The ODB peering establishes a secure private connection between your AWS Virtual Private Cloud, your VPC, then the Oracle Database, the ODB network that contains your Exadata Infrastructure.  This connection makes it possible for application servers that's running in your VPC, such as your Amazon EC2 instances to access your Oracle databases that is being hosted on Exadata within your ODB network. You specify the ODB network when you set up your infrastructure, specifically the Exadata Infrastructure. This network includes dedicated client, as well as backup subnets for an efficient and secure connectivity.  If you wish to enable multiple VPCs to connect to the same ODB network and access the Oracle Database@AWS resources, you can leverage AWS Transit Gateways or even an AWS Cloud WAN for scalable and centralized connectivity.   The virtual private cloud contains your application server, and that's securely paired with the Oracle Database network, creating a seamless, high-performance path to your application to interact with your Oracle Database.  ODB peering simplifies the connectivity between the AWS application environments and the Oracle Ex

    17 min

  3. FEB 3

    Oracle Multicloud Made Easy

    Multicloud is changing the way modern teams run their workloads: with real choice and real control.   In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham welcome Senior Principal OCI Instructor Sergio Castro, who explains how Oracle has partnered with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS to bring Oracle Database directly inside their data centers, unlocking sub-millisecond latency and new levels of flexibility.   They discuss how organizations can seamlessly migrate from on-premises or between clouds with minimal disruption, take advantage of best-in-class cloud services, and enhance business continuity.   Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-databaseaws-architect-professional/155574 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! We're kicking off a new season of the podcast today, this time on Oracle Database@AWS. But before we fully dive into that, we've got Sergio Castro with us to introduce multicloud and talk about some of its use cases. Sergio, who you may have heard on the podcast before, is a Senior Principal OCI Instructor with Oracle University.   01:02 Lois: Hi Sergio! Thanks for joining us today. We've spoken a lot about multicloud before, but we couldn't possibly discuss Oracle Database@AWS without another quick intro to multicloud. So, for anyone who doesn't already know, what is multicloud? And could you also talk about what Oracle is doing in this space?  Sergio: It is the use of several Cloud providers to deliver an IT service. Basically, a multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to distribute their workloads across multiple Cloud platforms and providers. This will help aiding the flexibility when picking the right tool for each job. Basically, by selecting the best Cloud Service, IT architects can take advantage of each provider's strengths, including custom hardware, software, and service capabilities. And Oracle is a pioneer in multi-cloud. We have partnerships with Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and we've been doing multi-cloud since 2019, including Oracle Interconnect for Azure and Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud. Our multi-cloud products is the Oracle Database Service at Azure, at Google Cloud, and at AWS. Here we have our database inside the data centers of these Cloud Service providers. And multi-cloud can be complemented by resources that you have on-premises, providing you with a hybrid Cloud model. And our public Cloud offerings are not limited to the commercial realm. Multi-cloud is beginning to be available also in the government realm. You can now find Oracle Interconnect for Azure in the US government realm. We also have government realm offerings in the UK and in the European Union. And of course, dedicated Cloud. If you're going to be involving on-premises, you can also have all the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources behind your firewall, behind your routers with dedicated Cloud. So the offers from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are really exceptional. It offers you great flexibility and choice. And the choice is yours. You select the platform for your Oracle Cloud solutions.  03:39 Nikita: You've already mentioned a few of them, but could you talk about the various benefits of multicloud? Sergio: A solid multi-cloud approach enables organizations to leverage the unique strengths and offerings of various Cloud service providers. By not being limited to a single vendor's capabilities or policies, businesses can adapt quickly to changing environments, deploy workloads where they fit best, and rapidly integrate new solutions as market demands evolve.  Relying on a single Cloud vendor can make it challenging and costly to migrate workloads or switch providers if businesses needs change. Multi-cloud strategies mitigate this risk by distributing applications and data across multiple platforms, making technology transition smoother and giving organizations greater bargaining power.  Now, diminishing single points of failure at the Cloud service provider level is great, because distributing systems and data across multiple clouds can definitely reduce dependence on a single provider or region.  This increased geographic diversity improves resilience and provides a more robust backup and recovery option, helping to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster or even an outage. With access to a range of pricing models and service levels from different providers, organizations can allocate workloads based on cost effectiveness.  This best fit approach encourages cost savings by enabling the selection of the most economical provider for each workload. And this facilitates continuous cost optimization efforts. For example, OCI provides significantly lower data egress charges, this in comparison to our competitors.  Multicloud management empowers organizations to place their workloads in the environments where they perform the best. By distributing workloads based on latency, processing power, or data proximity, businesses can realize performance improvements and achieve higher availability for their critical services.  Now regarding best of breed, each Cloud provider brings unique innovations and specialized services to the market. With a multi-cloud approach, organizations can tailor solutions to meet specific business needs.  Operating across multiple Cloud platforms means access to a wider array of data centers worldwide. This extended reach supports expansion into new markets, improves local performance for users, and helps satisfy data sovereignty requirements in diverse jurisdictions. And speaking about jurisdictions, this flexibility helps meet industry standards and regional data protection laws more effectively.  06:50 Nikita: You mentioned that Oracle's multicloud journey started in 2019 with Azure. What was that early phase like? Sergio: The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-cloud offering started with the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, where we connect FastConnect, our digital circuit, to the equivalent Express Route, the digital circuit of Microsoft Azure. Basically FastConnect, it is used typically for extending the OCI services into on-premises. In this case, it is extending these services into another Cloud Service provider, Microsoft Azure or various applications. 07:29 Lois: And then we moved on to Oracle Database Service for Azure, right?  Sergio: It's very similar to what we have right now, the Oracle Database Service at Azure, except that back then, the interface was on OCI. Basically on OCI, we had a console that resembled Azure, but all the services were still running on OCI. Now, the difference with Oracle Database Service at Azure is that we extended Oracle Cloud Infrastructure into the Azure data centers. So Oracle Database at Azure is a child site in the Microsoft Azure data centers. Basically we are placing our hardware in Azure data centers. And this gives us a very good latency, sub-one millisecond latency. 08:24 Lois: What about Oracle's multicloud services with Google and Amazon Web Services?  Sergio: Oracle Interconnect org and Oracle Database app are available for Google Cloud. We do have a service called Oracle Interconnect or Google Cloud, similar to the Azure one. And we also have the Oracle Database inside the Google Cloud data centers operating as a child site. And back in 2024 during Oracle Cloud World, we announced Oracle Database@AWS. This product is now available in two AWS regions. In a similar way, we have the Oracle Database inside the AWS data center with sub-one millisecond latency. We are currently in two data centers, but we have brought plans for being available in over 20 plan regions between Oracle Cloud and Amazon Web Services. 09:32 Nikita: Sergio, how do the capabilities of Oracle Database multicloud help enterprises modernize? Sergio: Oracle Database multi-cloud capabilities help enterprise modernize, adopting a Gen AI strategy, obviously, using the Oracle database to bring Oracle's powerful AI to business data. When you move to multi-cloud environments, you have a playground for you to test and run your workloads and then go into productions with your choice of services on the Oracle Exadata. And reducing risk, it's very easy to move to cloud and gain Oracle maximum availability architecture benefits. And by moving into a multi-cloud environment, you guarantee that you're going to be lowering your cost because you're going to be selecting the best of breed of the services that the Cloud Service provider can offer. Now, with the Oracle Database on multi-cloud environments, you're able to port your Oracle Database knowledge that you have from on-premises to a single cloud provider to a multi-cloud environment. It is the same solution, the same Oracle Database capabilities available everywhere-- on-premises, on your private cloud, on a single cloud provider, or on a multi-cloud environment. Having the same capabilities make it very easy to migrate from on-premises or to migrate from one cloud service provider to the other. Oracle Database multi-cloud solutions really

    17 min

  4. JAN 27 · BONUS

    From Curiosity to Career Growth: An Oracle AI Certification Journey

    Join us for an inspiring conversation with private equity advisor Jeffrey Malcolm as he shares how Oracle AI certification has transformed his career, family, and approach to business. Discover the real-world impact and opportunities that come from upskilling with Oracle's leading AI training programs.   AI Foundations: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/become-an-oci-ai-foundations-associate-2025/147781 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm your host, Lois Houston, and I'm joined today by Jeffrey Malcolm, Operating Adviser working in the private equity space, to talk about how Oracle AI certifications have impacted his professional and personal life. Hi Jeffrey, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Our conversation actually stems from a fascinating discussion we had at AI World, Oracle's annual user conference. There you shared your journey to becoming Oracle AI certified... How that process not only shifted your perspective on emerging technologies, but also influenced the way you work, interact with colleagues and clients, and even how you encourage continued learning in your own family. I'm really excited to dive deeper into your story and explore the value and real world benefits of certification in today's AI-driven landscape. 01:20 Jeffrey: Uh Lois, first of all, thank you for having me. Um, it was fantastic running into your teammates at AI World. It was amazing. You know, for for me, you know, as we go through this AI journey with my portfolio companies, I'm constantly looking at what are the new things out there? How can I get myself enabled? So, excited that we're having this conversation today. 01:42 Lois: That's great. So, let's start at the beginning. Before your certifications, what was your initial reaction when you heard about Oracle's OCI and AI certification programs? Were you immediately interested or was there hesitation? Jeffrey: I was skeptical. You know, I was skeptical about OCI capabilities as you guys didn't have much market penetration at the time. You know, in my technology career, I built several enterprise applications on AWS, Azure, and GCP. However, OCI Cloud was new and my wife Kay Malcolm, who you know, kept raving at home over and over about OCI, that the cloud was faster, it was more secure and cost friendly. All of which this thing that I'm hearing are appealing to me as a CIO because that's something that I need to control at my companies that I'm working with. Lois: Right. Jeffrey: So because even though I was skeptical I was like if all of these things are appealing to her, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to take the certification, I'm going to confirm all of these allegations that she's making to just make sure that, you know, it's actually true. And I was pleasantly surprised once I pulled the covers back. 02:59 Lois: So, you mentioned that your wife actually encouraged you to sign up for the free OCI Foundations training. Can you tell me a little bit more about that experience and how it influenced your decision to continue learning? Jeffrey: When she took the OCI test, at first she passed with a 95% score. So, you know, that encouraged me to just, you know, to take it as as as informative as I can. And to be honest, I wanted to beat her score because, you know, we're competitive. Um, upon passing and seeing the high quality of the candidate, you know, of the content. Uh, it was just hard for me to keep this internally. I wanted to share it with my network. I wanted to kind of see if there's others that could benefit from it. But you know my my initial piece was how can I beat her? And when I was able to date the score I I did score a 96 and beat her and I started sharing it with my network. And what happened Lois it was amazing. You know we we found a a cohort of individuals right around 50 who wanted to start taking the similar course. We were like hey this is something that's amazing. We had individuals who were teachers. We had individuals who had work in the corrections facility. We had plumbers. We had electrician. And they were all skeptical about taking this highly technical course. But we said, "Hey, it's self-paced. It's something that you can do and you can really benefit your career." So at the end, we had 50 people who took it. Of the 50, we had 30 brave souls who went ahead and took the certification. Um, and of the 30, we had a 24 people who passed. That's almost a 90% pass rate. Lois: Yeah.  Jeffrey: And it was so successful, we actually had one individual who shared their news. He was able to get a new position where he became a technical project manager and 3x his salary. So, it was just amazing to watch how people were brave enough to take this content, how OCI did an amazing job of making it self-paced and absorbable and then people got the certification, we published it on LinkedIn, and people actually got jobs. So, it was actually quite quite impressive. 05:24 Lois: That's an incredible story. So, you didn't just become a believer, you actually went and built an application on OCI, right? What was the project and how did your new skills play a role in making that happen? Jeffrey: That's that's a funny story. So at the time I was doing the uh the OCI training. I was building a mobile native application for a startup who was at the time looking to impact climate change. They were socially conscious enterprise dedicated to bring human-centered tools to individuals to live a better life and protect our environment. You know, the the main focus was how can they create an application that had no ads, only information, and provide a tool that would allow people to do joyful actions such as recycling, such as, you know, um looking at how you can lower your power consumption in your home, moving from plastics away from your home and just not consuming that much plastic. So we really wanted to gamify that and build an application that could do that. Uh my training gave me the confidence that as I was architecting the solution to say I needed to build something scalable and secure and full transparency at the time my myself and the rest of my development team was looking at completely AWS solutions. From this training I was like no if we really want something secure and scalable, the Oracle Database specifically Autonomous Database is it and we switched we built a multicloud solution across Azure um AWS and um GCP as well as OCI OCI had our backend and we built our application to leverage it specifically because after taking a training I was convinced that the backend needed to on Oracle Database specifically Autonomous Database. So it helped the the application had been running now for 3 years no issues um from a scalability standpoint and it's been fantastic for us. 07:34 Lois: Well that's great. That's a great story to uh to talk about how you leveraged your training and into something that actually made a difference in your job. So let's talk a little bit about your AI certification. You've described the AI foundations training that you took from Oracle University as demystifying. So tell me about some of the biggest takeaways for you. How did it shift your understanding of what AI really is and how it can be used? Jeffrey: That's a great point. Um you know in the last two three years AI has just been the talk of the town and specifically in my role as an advisor to private equity companies, I'm constantly being asked how can AI impact the top line? How can AI the bottom line and help us realize the multiple or investment pieces to exit um our our different companies? My background whenever I look at a problem I need to understand the guts of it and at the time there was all of these myths and and and confusion and scared to be honest around AI. So coming from an engineering background at MIT, one of the things MIT taught me is I need to look under the covers to truly understand something from a technology standpoint. Do my due diligence before sharing best practices with my portfolio companies that I'm working with. So that made me take on this challenge to say hey I need to understand what's the difference between machine learning, deep learning. What are the different you know kind of you know neural networks out there? When do you want to use it? So the AI foundation training that Oracle was offering was compelling to me to the point that I had had great success on the OCI's piece I'm like let me take this on. So that's what really started my journey back in January of 2023 um this was just a few months after the release of ChatGPT and I really wanted to understand how AI can like skyrocket and help our companies you know drive drive value. So that's what made me take it on. I wanted to understand what's the difference between RNN you know recurrent neural networks convolutional um neural networks and what's the best business case that our companies can use? What's the best time to use a vector database? Why is it important? Why is it needed for AI solution? I wanted to be able to articulate the difference between a RAG and Agentic AI workflow to our companies so that's really was the impass of as to why I wanted to take on this piece and why I wanted to do uh the AI foundational training. 10:08 Lois: And your journey didn't stop with you and K

    28 min

  5. JAN 20

    Driving Business Value with OCI – Part 2

    Security, compliance, and resilience are the cornerstones of trust.   In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their conversation with David Mills and Tijo Thomas, exploring how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure empowers organizations to protect data, stay compliant, and scale with confidence.   Real-world examples from Zoom, KDDI, 8x8, and Uber highlight these capabilities.   Cloud Business Jumpstart: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/cloud-business-jumpstart/152957 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.     -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University. Nikita: Hi everyone! In our last episode, we started the conversation around the real business value of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how it helps organizations create impact at scale. Lois: Today, we're taking a closer look at what keeps the value strong — things like security, compliance, and the technology that helps businesses stay resilient. To walk us through it, we have our experts from Oracle University, David Mills, Senior Principal PaaS Instructor, and Tijo Thomas, Principal OCI Instructor.  01:12 Nikita: Hi David and Tijo! It's great to have you both here! Tijo, let's start with you. How does Oracle Cloud Infrastructure help organizations stay secure? Tijo: OCI uses a security first approach to protect customer workloads. This is done with implementing a Zero Trust Model. A Zero Trust security model use frequent user authentication and authorization to protect assets while continuously monitoring for potential breaches. This would assume that no users, no devices, no applications are universally trusted. Continuous verification is always required. Access is granted only based on the context of request, the level of trust, and the sensitivity of that asset. There are three strategic pillars that Oracle security first approach is built on. The first one is being automated. With automation, the business doesn't have to rely on any manual work to stay secure. Threat detection, patching, and compliance checks, all these happen automatically. And that reduces human errors and also saving time. Security in OCI is always turned on. Encryption is automatic. Identity checks are continuous. Security is not an afterthought in OCI. It is incorporated into every single layer. Now, while we talk about Oracle's security first approach, remember security is a shared responsibility, and what that means while Oracle handles the data center, the hardware, the infrastructure, software, consumers are responsible for securing their apps, configurations and the data. 03:06 Lois: Tijo, let's discuss this with an example. Imagine an online store called MuShop. They're a fast-growing business selling cat products. Can you walk us through how a business like this can enhance its end-to-end security and compliance with OCI? Tijo: First of all, focusing on securing web servers. These servers host the web portal where customers would browse, they log in, and place their orders. So these web servers are a prime target for attackers. To protect these entry points, MuShop deployed a service called OCI Web Application Firewall. On top of that, the MuShop business have also used OCI security list and network security groups that will control their traffic flow. As when the businesses grow, new users such as developers, operations, finance, staff would all need to be onboarded. OCI identity services is used to assign roles, for example, giving developers access to only the dev instances, and finance would access just the billing dashboards. MuShop also require MFA multi-factor authentication, and that use both password and a time-based authentication code to verify their identities. Talking about some of the critical customer data like emails, addresses, and the payment info, this data is stored in databases and storage. Using OCI Vault, the data is encrypted with customer managed keys. Oracle Data Safe is another service, and that is used to audit who has got access to sensitive tables, and also mask real customer data in non-production environments. 04:59 Nikita: Once those systems are in place, how can MuShop use OCI tools to detect and respond to threats quickly? Tijo: For that, MuShop used a service called OCI Cloud Guard. Think of it like a security operation center, and which is built right into OCI. It monitors the entire OCI environment continuously, and it can track identity activities, storage settings, network configurations and much more. If it finds something risky, like a publicly exposed object storage bucket, or maybe a user having a broad access to that environment, it raises a security finding. And better yet, it can automatically respond. So if someone creates a resource outside of their policy, OCI Cloud Guard can disable it.  05:48 Lois: And what about preventing misconfigurations? How does OCI make that easier while keeping operations secure?  Tijo: OCI Security Zone is another service and that is used to enforce security postures in OCI. The goody zones help you to avoid any accidental misconfigurations. For example, in a security zone, you can choose users not to create a storage bucket that is publicly accessible. To stay ahead of vulnerabilities, MuShop runs OCI vulnerability scanning. They have scheduled to scan weekly to capture any outdated libraries or misconfigurations. OCI Security Advisor is another service that is used to flag any unused open ports and with recommending stronger access rules. MuShop needed more than just security. They also had to be compliant. OCI's compliance certifications have helped them to meet data privacy and security regulations across different regions and industries. There are additional services like OCI audit logs for traceability that help them pass internal and external audits. 07:11 Oracle University is proud to announce three brand new courses that will help your teams unlock the power of Redwood—the next generation design system. Redwood enhances the user experience, boosts efficiency, and ensures consistency across Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. Whether you're a functional lead, configuration consultant, administrator, developer, or IT support analyst, these courses will introduce you to the Redwood philosophy and its business impact. They'll also teach you how to use Visual Builder Studio to personalize and extend your Fusion environment. Get started today by visiting mylearn.oracle.com.  07:52 Nikita: Welcome back! We know that OCI treats security as a continuous design principle: automated, always on, and built right into the platform. David, do you have a real-world example of a company that needed to scale rapidly and was able to do so successfully with OCI? David: In late 2019, Zoom averaged 10 million meeting participants a day. By April 2020, well that number surged to over 300 million as video conferencing became essential for schools, businesses, and families around the world due to the global pandemic. To meet that explosive demand, Zoom chose OCI not just for performance, but for the ability to scale fast. In just nine hours, OCI engineers helped Zoom move from deployment to live production, handling hundreds of thousands of concurrent meetings immediately. Within weeks, they were supporting millions. And Zoom didn't just scale, they sustained it. With OCI's next-gen architecture, Zoom avoided the performance bottlenecks common in legacy clouds. They used OCI functions and cloud native services to scale workloads flexibly and securely. Today, Zoom transfers more than seven petabytes of data per day through Oracle Cloud. That's enough bandwidth to stream HD video continuously for 93 years. And they do it while maintaining high availability, low latency, and enterprise grade security. As articulated by their CEO Erik Yuan, Zoom didn't just meet the moment, they redefined it with OCI behind the scenes. 09:45 Nikita: That's an incredible story about scale and agility. Do you have more examples of companies that turned to OCI to solve complex data or integration challenges? David: Telecom giant KDDI with over 64 million subscribers, faced a growing data dilemma. Data was everywhere. Survey results, system logs, behavioral analytics, but it was scattered across thousands of sources. Different tools for different tasks created silos, delays, and rising costs. KDDI needed a single platform to connect it all, and they chose Oracle. They replaced their legacy data systems with a modern data platform built on OCI and Autonomous Database. Now they can analyze behavior, improve service planning, and make faster, smarter decisions without the data chaos. But KDDI didn't stop there. They built a 300 terabyte data lake and connected all their systems-- custom on-prem apps, SaaS providers like Salesforce, and even multi-cloud infrastructure. Thanks to Oracle Integration and pre-built adapters, everything works together in real-time, even across clouds. AWS, Azure, and OCI now operate in harmony. The results? Reduced operational costs, faster development cycles, governance and API access improved across the board. KDDI can now analyze customer behavior to

    16 min

  6. JAN 14

    Driving Business Value with OCI–Part 1

    Understanding cloud costs can be challenging, but it's essential for maximizing value. In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham speak with Oracle Cloud experts David Mills and Tijo Thomas about how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers predictable pricing, robust security, and high performance. They also introduce FinOps, a practical approach to tracking and optimizing cloud spending. Cloud Business Jumpstart: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/cloud-business-jumpstart/152957  Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community  LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/  X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu  Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.    -------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:27 Nikita: Welcome back to another episode of the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and I'm joined by Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services.  Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we talked about how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings together developer tools, automation, and AI on a single platform. In today's episode, we're highlighting the real-world impact OCI can have on business outcomes. 00:58 Nikita: And to tell us about this, we have our experts David Mills and Tijo Thomas back with us. David is a Senior Principal PaaS Instructor and Tijo is a Principal OCI Instructor, and they're both from Oracle University. David, let's start with you. What makes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure the trusted choice for organizations across industries like banking, healthcare, retail, and government? David: It all comes down to one thing. OCI was built for real businesses, not side projects, not hobby apps, not test servers, but mission-critical systems at scale.  Most clouds brag about their speed, but OCI is consistently fast, even under pressure. And that's because Oracle built OCI on a non-blocking network and bare metal infrastructure, with dedicated resources and no noisy neighbors. So, whether you're running one application or 1,000, you get predictable, low latency, performance every time as OCI doesn't force you into any specific mold. You want full control? Spin up a virtual machine and configure everything. You need to move fast? Use a managed service like Autonomous Database or Kubernetes. Prefer to build your own containers, functions, APIs, or develop with low code or even no code tools? OCI supports all of it. And it plays nicely with your existing stack—on-prem or in another cloud. OCI adapts to how you already work instead of making you start over.  02:39 Lois: And when it comes to pricing, how does OCI help customers manage costs more effectively?  David: OCI is priced for real business use, not just the flashy low entry number. You only pay for what you use. No overprovisioning, no lock in. Virtual machines can scale up and down automatically. Object storage automatically shifts to a lower cost tier based on frequency of access. Autonomous services don't need babysitting or patching. And unlike some providers, OCI doesn't charge you to get your own data back. It's enterprise grade cloud without enterprise grade sticker shock. 03:26 Lois: Security and flexibility are top priorities for many organizations. How does OCI address those challenges? David: OCI treats security as a starting point, not an upsell. From the moment you create an account, every tenant is isolated. All data is encrypted. Admin activity is logged and security tools like Cloud Guard are ready to go. And if you need to prove compliance for GDRP, FedRAMP, HIPAA, or more, you're covered. OCI is trusted by the world's most regulated industries. Most companies don't live in one cloud. They've got legacy systems, other cloud providers, and different teams doing different things. OCI is designed to work in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Connect to your on-prem apps with VPN or FastConnect. Run Oracle workloads in your data center with Cloud@Customer. Interconnect with Azure and Google Cloud or integrate with Amazon. OCI isn't trying to lock you in. It's seeking to meet you where you are and help you modernize without breaking what works. 04:40 Nikita: Can you share an example of a business that's seen measurable results with OCI? David: A national health care provider was stuck on aging hardware with slow batch processing and manual upgrades. They migrated core patient systems to OCI and used Oracle Autonomous Database for faster, self-managed workloads. They leveraged Oracle Integration to connect legacy electronic health records, OCI FastConnect to keep real-time sync with data in their on-prem systems, and they went from 12-hour downtime Windows to zero, from three weeks to launch a feature to three days, and they cut infrastructure cost by 38%. And that's what choosing OCI looks like. 05:37 Are you looking to boost your expertise in enterprise AI? Check out the Oracle AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications Developers course and professional certification—now available through Oracle University. This course helps you build, customize, and deploy AI Agents for Fusion HCM, SCM, and CX, with hands-on labs and real-world case studies. Ready to set yourself apart with in-demand skills and a professional credential? Learn more and get started today! Visit mylearn.oracle.com for more details. 06:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Tijo, controlling costs while driving innovation is a tough balancing act for many organizations. What are the biggest challenges organizations face when trying to manage and optimize their cloud spending? Tijo: The first one is unexpected cloud cost. Let's be honest. Cloud bills can be shocking. You think you've got things under control, that the invoice shows up and you realize it is way over the budget. Without real-time visibility, it is quite hard to catch these surprises before they happen. The next one is with waste of resources and inefficiencies. It is quite common to find resources that are just sitting idle, such as unused storage, underutilized CPU, or overprovisioned memory. It may not seem like there are much of resource wastage at first, but over time all that is really going to add up. Then there is no clear ownership of cloud spend. It is one of the big problem in cost management. If cost are not clearly tagged to a team or a project, nobody feels responsible, and that makes it really tough to manage or reduce the cloud spend. There is also misaligned priorities across teams, and looking at different teams like finance, they may want to cut the cost while engineering want to move faster, operations want everything to be up and running. While every team is doing their best, but without a common approach to cost, it becomes challenging to prioritize tasks. Slow and reactive decision making is another challenge. Most cost issues gets identified after the bill is invoiced, and by then the budget has been already spent. Without timely data, it becomes difficult to make real time changes. And then complex, multi-cloud and regional footprint. As businesses grow across regions and with multi-cloud deployment model, tracking where the budget is going gets really tricky. More services means there are more teams and more complexity. Now, all of these challenges have one thing in common. They need a better way to manage cloud cost together. And this is where FinOps comes in. 08:42 Lois: And what exactly is FinOps? How does it address these cloud cost challenges? Tijo: FinOps stands for financial operations. It is a framework that brings teams like engineering, operations, finance, and beyond to work together so that the cloud spending becomes smarter, more visible, and better aligned towards business goals. And so FinOps is not just a tool, it is a way of working. According to FinOps Foundation, FinOps lifecycle happens in three phases: inform, optimize, and operate.  The inform phase is about visibility and allocation, which means you gather the cost, usage, and efficiency data in order to forecast and budget. The optimize phase is about rates and usage, and this is where you would take action to optimize or bring efficiencies. And then in operate, you turn those into continuous improvements through policies, trainings, and automation. 09:51 Nikita: Let's unpack FinOps a bit more. Why is understanding your cloud subscription model so fundamental in the Inform phase? Tijo: Because cost visibility is very important while managing your Oracle Cloud subscription. There are two ways to purchase OCI services. The first one, we refer to it as pay as you go model, which means you pay for what you use, and the second one is called universal credit annual commitment model, where you can purchase a prepaid amount of universal credits, and the prepaid amount will be drawn down based on actual usage. OCI provides a portal called FinOps Hub, where you can easily track how your usage has changed month by month over the past year. Through the Hub, you can monitor whether you have stayed within your credit allocation or not. You will also see how much of your committed credits have been used, how much is left, and when is your commitment set to expire. The next step is to gain visibility or to understand the cost. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this starts with the service called cost analysis. OCI Cost Analysis is a service that would help you to filter, group, and visualize your cloud cost in a way that makes sense for your business. You can comp

    17 min

  7. JAN 6

    Getting to Know Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

    Every system depends on reliable infrastructure behind the scenes. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers that reliability with speed, flexibility, and built-in security.   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they speak with Oracle Cloud experts David Mills and Tijo Thomas about what makes OCI different and how it drives real results for businesses of every size.   Cloud Business Jumpstart https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/cloud-business-jumpstart/152957 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -----------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University. Nikita: Hi everyone, and welcome to a brand-new season of the podcast! We're really excited about this one because we'll be diving into how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is transforming the way businesses innovate, stay secure, and drive results.  00:55 Lois: And to help us with this, we've got two experts who know this space inside out—David Mills, Senior Principal PaaS Instructor, and Tijo Thomas, Principal OCI Instructor, both from Oracle University. Hi David! For those who might not be familiar, could you explain what Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is? David: OCI, as we call it, is Oracle's enterprise grade cloud platform, built from the ground up to run the systems that matter most to business. It provides the infrastructure and platform services businesses need to build, run, and scale applications securely, globally, and cost effectively. To provide more context, all of Oracle's SaaS applications such as NetSuite, Customer Experience, Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, as well as Enterprise Resource and Enterprise Performance Management, they all run on OCI. But OCI isn't just for Oracle's own apps. It's a full featured cloud platform used by thousands of customers to run their own applications, data, and services. OCI includes platform services such as databases, integration, analytics, and many others, and of course, the infrastructure services, such as compute, networking, and storage, which comprise the core of OCI. Bottom line, if something is running on Oracle Cloud, OCI is behind it. OCI includes over 100 services across numerous categories like compute, storage, networking, database, containers, AI, developer tools, integration, security, observability, and much more. So, whether you're lifting and shifting legacy workloads or building new apps in the cloud, OCI has the building blocks. 03:02 Lois: David, who was OCI designed for? David: OCI was built from scratch to address the limitations of first-generation clouds. No patchwork of legacy acquisitions, just a clean, modern, high-performance foundation designed for real enterprise workloads. OCI was designed for businesses that can't compromise financial services, health care, retail, governments, customers with strict regulations, global scale, and mission-critical systems. These are the companies choosing OCI not just because it works, but because it works under pressure. 03:42 Nikita: What else makes OCI different from other cloud platforms? David: Oracle's network and storage architecture delivers low latency results consistently. Then there's pricing—simple, predictable, and often much lower than our competitors. OCI was designed with governance and security in every layer. OCI supports all types of cloud strategies: public cloud, hybrid deployments, multi-cloud environments, and even a dedicated cloud we can install inside your own data center. We call all that distributed cloud, and that's where OCI really shines. OCI gives you everything you need to modernize your technology stack, run securely at scale, and build for the future without giving up control or blowing your budget. 04:37 Lois: Now, Tijo, we've covered what OCI is, who it's for, and what makes it unique. Let's switch gears a bit and talk about cloud regions. For anyone who doesn't know, a cloud region is just a specific geographic location where Oracle, or any cloud provider, runs its own data centers. Why does the choice of region matter for businesses, and what should they think about when picking one? Tijo: Many businesses are required by law to keep their data within national borders, whether it is GDPR in Europe or local privacy laws in Australia or Singapore, choosing the right region would help you to stay compliant.  The closer your applications are to your users, the faster they perform. Running in a nearby region means lower latency, faster response times, and better customer experience. Then there is disaster recovery and high availability. Regions are the building blocks for setting up failover strategies. By deploying workloads in multiple regions, businesses can protect themselves from outages and keeping their systems in running state. Some businesses also need to meet industry-specific compliance requirements. Think of sectors like health care, government, or finance. They often require that the infrastructure and the data should stay within the national or regional boundaries. If your business is growing into new markets, regions allow you to deploy apps and services closer to your customers and without having the need to build new data centers. Regions also enable local integrations and partnerships, whether it is connecting with ISPs, local service providers, or complying with in-country partner requirements. Having a region nearby makes that integrations and operations smoother. Regions are not just about geography. They are a critical part of how the businesses would stay compliant, resilient, and responsive across the globe. Oracle runs a fast-growing global network of cloud regions, and each OCI region is fully independent and fully isolated. You choose your regions, and your data stays there. 07:06 Nikita: And are there different types of cloud regions? Tijo: There are several commercial regions, sovereign regions, government regions, and multi-cloud regions. Even with a wide range of cloud regions, some organizations cannot move their workloads and its data to the public cloud. Those workloads may need to stay in their own on-premises data center, but at the same time, they still want to leverage the benefits of OCI. 07:42 Take your cloud skills to the next level with the new Oracle Database@AWS course. Master provisioning, migration, security, and high availability for Oracle Database on AWS. Then validate your experience with an industry-recognized certification. Stand out in the multicloud space and accelerate your career. Visit mylearn.oracle.com for more information. 08:09 Nikita: Welcome back! We were talking about workloads and how some companies may have to keep their workloads on-premises. Why would they need to do that, Tijo? Tijo: First, data sovereignty. Let's say there may not be a list of public cloud region that the organization is looking for, or maybe the business need to set up a disaster recovery strategy within that specific location. Then there is security and control. Some industries have very strict regulations, and they require physical access and oversight of their infrastructure. And finally, there are latency-sensitive workloads. These are applications that cannot afford the delay of going back and forth to a remote cloud region. They need cloud services right next to their physical data center.  08:59 Nikita: So, how does Oracle help with that? Tijo: To address these requirements, Oracle introduces a set of offerings. The first one is called dedicated region, and the second one is called Cloud@Customer services. Through both these offerings, you get OCI services right in your data center and all behind your firewall, while achieving the benefits of flexibility and automation.  09:24 Nikita: So, what's a dedicated region? Tijo: Dedicated region is a completely managed cloud region that brings all the OCI services and Oracle Fusion SaaS applications within your data centers. Along with deploying the full stack OCI, you would receive support for Oracle Fusion SaaS applications and also gain a consistent experience with the same SLAs, APIs, and the tools available in Oracle Cloud. 09:53 Lois: Ok and what about Cloud@Customer? Tijo: While dedicated region is ideal for large scale enterprise needs, with full stack OCI and SaaS, some organizations just require a lighter footprint. And that's where Cloud@Customer comes in. And to begin with, we'll talk about Compute Cloud@Customer. It is a fully managed rack scale infrastructure that allows you to use the core OCI services, like the OCI compute, OCI storage, and OCI networking services at your on-premises. With Compute Cloud@Customer, you can run applications and middleware systems to provide consistent user experience and simplify IT administration across your distributed cloud architecture. We can plan to run the same application stack everywhere and centrally manage them without needing experts in every location.  10:52 Nikita: Is there a way to make running your Oracle databases easier and more cost-effective? Tijo: That's why Oracle offers you Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer combines the performance of Oracle Exadata with the simplicity, flexibility, a

    19 min
  8. Best of 2025: Unlocking the Power of Oracle APEX and AI

    12/23/2025

    Best of 2025: Unlocking the Power of Oracle APEX and AI

    Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham explore how Oracle APEX integrates with AI to build smarter low-code applications. They are joined by Chaitanya Koratamaddi, Director of Product Management at Oracle, who explains the basics of Oracle APEX, its global adoption, and the challenges it addresses for businesses managing and integrating data.   They also explore real-world use cases of AI within the Oracle APEX ecosystem   Oracle APEX: Empowering Low Code Apps with AI: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-apex-empowering-low-code-apps-with-ai/146047/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University.   Nikita: Hi everyone! We hope you've been enjoying these last few weeks as we've been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year. Today's episode is the last one in this series and is a throwback to a conversation on APEX with Chaitanya Koratamaddi, Director of Product Management for Oracle APEX.  00:57 Lois: We began by asking Chaitanya what Oracle APEX is and why it's so widely used. So, let's jump right in!   Chaitanya: Oracle APEX is the world's most popular enterprise low code application platform. APEX enables you to build secure and scalable enterprise-scale applications with world class features that can be deployed anywhere, cloud or on-premises. And with APEX, you can build applications 20 times faster with 100 times less code. APEX delivers the most productive way to develop and deploy mobile and web applications everywhere. 01:40 Lois: That's impressive. So, what's the adoption rate like for Oracle APEX? Chaitanya: As of today, there are 19 million plus APEX applications created globally. 5,000 plus APEX applications are created on a daily basis and there are 800,000 plus APEX developers worldwide. 60,000 plus customers in 150 countries across various industry verticals. And 75% of Fortune 500 companies use Oracle APEX. 02:19 Nikita: Wow, the numbers really speak for themselves, right? But Chaitanya, why are organizations adopting Oracle APEX at this scale? Or to put it differently, what's the core business challenge that Oracle APEX is addressing? Chaitanya: From databases to all data, you know that the world is more connected and automated than ever. To drive new business value, organizations need to explore and exploit new sources of data that are generated from this connected world. That can be sounds, feeds, sensors, videos, images, and more. Businesses need to be able to work with all types of data and also make sure that it is available to be used together. Typically, businesses need to work on all data at a massive scale. For example, supply chains are no longer dependent just on inventory, demand, and order management signals. A manufacturer should be able to understand data describing global weather patterns and how it impacts their supply chains. Businesses need to pull in data from as many social sources as possible to understand how customer sentiment impacts product sales and corporate brands. Our customers need a data platform that ensures all this data works together seamlessly and easily. 04:00 Lois: So, you're saying Oracle APEX is the platform that helps businesses manage and integrate data seamlessly. But data is just one part of the equation, right? Then there's AI. How are the two related?  Chaitanya: Before we start talking about Oracle AI, let's first talk about what customers are looking for and where they are struggling within their AI innovation. It all starts with data. For decades, working with data has largely involved dealing with structured data, whether it is your customer records in your CRM application and orders from your ERP database. Data was organized into database and tables, and when you needed to find some insights in your data, all you need to do is just use stored procedures and SQL queries to deliver the answers. But today, the expectations are higher. You want to use AI to construct sophisticated predictions, find anomalies, make decisions, and even take actions autonomously. And the data is far more complicated. It is in an endless variety of formats scattered all over your business. You need tools to find this data, consume it, and easily make sense of it all. And now capabilities like natural language processing, computer vision, and anomaly detection are becoming very essential just like how SQL queries used to be. You need to use AI to analyze phone call transcripts, support tickets, or email complaints so you can understand what customers need and how they feel about your products, customer service, and brand. You may want to use a data source as noisy and unstructured as social media data to detect trends and identify issues in real time.  Today, AI capabilities are very essential to accelerate innovation, assess what's happening in your business, and most importantly, exceed the expectations of your customers. So, connecting your application, data, and infrastructure allows everyone in your business to benefit from data. 06:54 Oracle University is proud to announce three brand new courses that will help your teams unlock the power of Redwood—the next generation design system. Redwood enhances the user experience, boosts efficiency, and ensures consistency across Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. Whether you're a functional lead, configuration consultant, administrator, developer, or IT support analyst, these courses will introduce you to the Redwood philosophy and its business impact. They'll also teach you how to use Visual Builder Studio to personalize and extend your Fusion environment. Get started today by visiting mylearn.oracle.com.  07:35 Nikita: Welcome back! So, let's focus on AI across the Oracle Cloud ecosystem. How does Oracle bring AI into the mix to connect applications, data, and infrastructure for businesses? Chaitanya: By embedding AI throughout the entire technology stack from the infrastructure that businesses run on through the applications for every line of business, from finance to supply chain and HR, Oracle is helping organizations pragmatically use AI to improve performance while saving time, energy, and resources.  Our core cloud infrastructure includes a unique AI infrastructure layer based on our supercluster technology, leveraging the latest and greatest hardware and uniquely able to get the maximum out of the AI infrastructure technology for scenarios such as large language processing. Then there is generative AI and ML for data platforms. On top of the AI infrastructure, our database layer embeds AI in our products such as autonomous database. With autonomous database, you can leverage large language models to use natural language queries rather than writing a SQL when interacting with the autonomous database. This enables you to achieve faster AI adoption in your application development. Businesses and their customers can use the Select AI natural language interface combined with Oracle Database AI Vector Search to obtain quicker, more intuitive insights into their own data. Then we have AI services. AI services are a collection of offerings, including generative AI with pre-built machine learning models that make it easier for developers to apply AI to applications and business operations. The models can be custom-trained for more accurate business results. 09:47 Nikita: And what specific AI services do we have at Oracle, Chaitanya?  Chaitanya: We have Oracle Digital Assistant Speech, Language, Vision, and Document Understanding. Then we have Oracle AI for Applications. Oracle delivers AI built for business, helping you make better decisions faster and empowering your workforce to work more effectively. By embedding classic and generative AI into its applications, Fusion Apps customers can instantly access AI outcomes wherever they are needed without leaving the software environment they use every day to power their business. 10:32 Lois: Let's talk specifically about APEX. How does APEX use the Gen AI and machine learning models in the stack to empower developers. How does it help them boost productivity? Chaitanya: Starting APEX 24.1, you can choose your preferred large language models and leverage native generative AI capabilities of APEX for AI assistants, prompt-based application creation, and more. Using native OCI capabilities, you can leverage native platform capabilities from OCI, like AI infrastructure and object storage, etc. Oracle APEX running on autonomous infrastructure in Oracle Cloud leverages its unique native generative AI capabilities tuned specifically on your data. These language models are schema aware, data aware, and take into account the shape of information, enabling your applications to take advantage of large language models pre-trained on your unique data. You can give your users greater insights by leveraging native capabilities, including vector-based similarity search, content summary, and predictions. You can also incorporate powerful AI features to deliver personalized experiences and recommendations, process natural language prompts, and more by integrating directly with a suite of OCI AI services. 12:08 Ni

    15 min
See All (151)

3.5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Oracle University Podcast delivers convenient, foundational training on popular Oracle technologies such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Java, Autonomous Database, and more to help you jump-start or advance your career in the cloud.

Information

  • Creator
    Oracle Corporation
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    151
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2023 Oracle Corporation
  • Show Website
    Oracle University Podcast

You Might Also Like