Oracle and Top-Flight Customers Lead the Charge in Cloud Applications

CEO Mark Hurd gets even more bullish on cloud adoption

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who last year predicted that 85 percent of production applications will run in the cloud by 2025, got more aggressive in updated guidance shared. Migration to cloud is happening far faster than anticipated, he said.

“Cloud is irrefutable; it’s foundational,” Hurd added during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote. “This is no longer a debate. The only thing we’re debating is the speed of getting this done.”

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Hurd shared the stage with customers and offered new cloud prognostications. By 2025, Hurd predicts:

• 100 percent of cloud applications will include artificial intelligence (AI)
• 85 percent of all customer interactions will be automated
• 60 percent of all IT jobs have not been invented yet, but will be in that timeframe

On that last point, Hurd said automation will not replace jobs but create them. New careers fueled by the use of AI and other emerging technologies will include supervisors for robots, smart city technology designers, AI-assisted healthcare technicians, and data professionals.

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Customer Navindra Yadav, founder of Tetration Analytics (now a Cisco company), told Hurd his company realized big performance and cost advantages running on Oracle Cloud as compared to two other public cloud providers.

More from Mark Hurd:

• Cloud and integrated technologies such as AI lower cost, drive more innovation, and improve productivity
• Blockchain will be a feature of virtually all applications where it can be part of enabling the exchange of secure information
• As evidence of cloud acceleration, Hurd said “last year alone, 15 percent of the U.S. corporate-owned datacenters shut down”

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