Oracle Database@AWS simplifies data unification, says AWS’ Luke Anderson

In an exclusive interaction with Luke Anderson, Lead of Data and AI Business, Asia Pacific and Japan at AWS, he shares insights on the general availability of Oracle Database@AWS. He discusses how this partnership is driven by direct customer demand, the technical and commercial benefits, and how it supports enterprise data unification, scalability, and generative AI strategies across APJ markets.

I can share some details about the announcements and their specifications.

We are launching the Oracle database@AWS across US East and US West regions in at least two availability zones for our customers to start accessing, using, and migrating some of the benefits of Oracle Exadata databases and Oracle Autonomous databases within the AWS environment.

We are announcing the general availability of the service in two regions: US East and US West, with plans to expand to 20 additional regions globally. This is particularly significant for APJ, as a considerable number of these upcoming regions are within our geography.

In India, we plan to launch in Hyderabad and Mumbai, aligned with our existing AWS regions. Additionally, we will expand to Osaka and Tokyo in Japan, along with Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. This will ensure comprehensive coverage across key Asia Pacific geographies within the year. APJ is clearly on a fast track for feature rollouts in this service.

We are often asked about the significance of this announcement and the benefits it brings. Fundamentally, this initiative is driven by customer demand; over 90% of our features and services originate from direct customer feedback.

With the growing adoption of generative AI, customers are increasingly recognising the critical role of data in producing trustworthy, beneficial, and creative AI outcomes. Many of our customers, particularly those using Oracle Exadata and Oracle Autonomous Databases, have asked how they can better utilise their existing data investments within the broader generative AI ecosystem.

This announcement addresses that need. Customers can now seamlessly leverage data across a range of sources, from DynamoDB, Redshift, and S3, including Apache Iceberg tables, to mission-critical transactional data stored in Oracle Exadata and Autonomous Databases, enabling them to unlock greater value and insights as part of their generative AI strategies.

From an AWS perspective, what is the key value proposition of the Oracle and AWS partnership for enterprise customers, especially when they are utilising this Oracle database@AWS, particularly for customers in the US East and US West regions?

There are multitudes of benefits. Many of the customers who have been using Oracle database@AWS in a limited preview are actually from some of the larger enterprises in more regulated industries, such as financial services or insurance. Some of the benefits they are citing to us, and some of the feedback we have had from our customers previously, is that they are looking to unify their data experience to get the benefits out of it, rather than having the data in two separate places. The preference they are looking for is simplification in bringing the data together. While you could query it in two different places, you would then be managing it through two different monitoring systems, two different security commissions, and so on.

With Oracle database on AWS, it enables customers who are using Exadata, Autonomous Database, and OCI to seamlessly migrate their databases and data workloads onto AWS. This happens without refactoring the application, preserving the same schemas, and preserving the same performance and latency requirements. Now, this occurs within the AWS environment, so our customers are familiar with the AWS console or IAM roles and permissions, all the way through to CloudWatch and CloudTrail. It enables our customers to expand their existing use with familiar tools.

In addition, it now makes it much easier to leverage the data in the highly performing, low-latency databases, such as Oracle Exadata, with data customers are also storing in S3 tables, RDS, or Redshift. This helps unify the data elements to create awesome outcomes. These outcomes could be anything from more insightful reporting, building new applications for their end customers, or even building and training new models. We are using the datasets to create separate data stores in terms of leveraging them for rank-based outcomes and generative AI. This makes it much quicker and more seamless for our customers to use their data, which we know is one of the most valuable assets for our customers.

There is also a commercial benefit. When a customer wants to leverage Oracle Database and AWS, the procurement process is through AWS Marketplace. They now have a single bill and can access Oracle Database and AWS through AWS Marketplace, which again creates a more simplified and streamlined procurement process.

You discussed the commercial benefits. What are the technical and operational benefits that AWS will bring to this partnership, especially regarding scalability, security, and resilience?

Our focus has always been on the customer. When we say the customer, it is not only providing the broadest and deepest set of features and capabilities, but at a more granular level, the broadest and deepest set of database capabilities. If you recall re: Invent last year in December, we made numerous announcements in our database services, whether with distributed SQL or supporting the latest versions of Valkyrie databases. This is a further extension and expansion of database services to provide our customers with choice and flexibility.

In addition, this aligns with the heritage of AWS, which is security. Security is our top priority. When customers are building and leveraging AWS Cloud, there is a sense of confidence and trust that they work with an organisation that prioritises security. Security and resilience, but it encompasses scalability, choice, and flexibility. Customers can build rapidly and quickly, scale globally, in a cost-effective way, all within a secure environment, regardless of what they want to build.

If a customer onboards on Oracle Database@AWS, will they be able to leverage existing AWS investments and established operational practices?

To reiterate, for our customers, focusing on simplification, not only are we looking at enabling our customers to have a simple process through the AWS Marketplace, we also want to preserve any financial commitments that they have made to us. Any spend they incur through Oracle Database and AWS Marketplace will count towards their AWS commitments.

Could you elaborate on how you are leveraging your generative AI services and ML services into Oracle Database@AWS to accelerate AI innovation?

There are many different ways. If we consider data unification, we announced at re: Invent the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, which is broken down into a unified developer experience, data governance, and a unified studio. As data moves into AWS, within the AWS environment, we are very strong in helping our customers build a secure, governed, and controlled data environment, whether that data is on AWS or Oracle Database@AWS. Then we bring it into a unified studio experience.

The unified studio experience allows us to leverage data residing not only in Oracle Database@AWS but also in Redshift and other third parties, bringing these elements together into a unified experience. From that unified experience, you can then start doing awesome things, whether with Amazon Bedrock and building new generative AI applications, workflows, or objective applications with agents for Amazon Bedrock. Each of the agents, objective workflows, or standard applications can use data elements created through the Amazon SageMaker unified studio experience. Therefore, all the high transaction processing, potentially customer data, stored within your Oracle Exadata environment, can now be leveraged to improve the customer experience through a generative AI application built on Amazon Bedrock. It is important to note that this is all within the AWS, within a secure, safe, resilient, and scalable environment.

While both companies are collaborating, what kind of customer support experience can we expect from this partnership? How will customer support issues be divided between the two companies?

The specifics of it, we can provide later. However, the essence is that we start by working backwardsthe  from our customers and their problems. We have enterprise customers, enterprise support, and support agreements in place. As part of this agreement, we will continue to provide support for our customers in conjunction with Oracle as part of our partnership.

While both companies are collaborating, what kind of business growth or ROI are you expecting from this partnership, and for what timeframe are you looking to achieve substantial business growth?

We are hearing from customers across Asia Pacific that this is an awesome announcement. They are asking when they can get it and want to start using it immediately. They want to leverage their Exadata environments with their other data sets and other Oracle databases they are running on AWS, and want to bring them together as quickly as possible. This is what we are anchoring towards, as opposed to solely focusing on ROI. Our focus is very much on improving and enabling our customer experience and meeting and delivering on the requirements they have provided us.