Two key areas of technology that Oracle is innovating in are blockchain and IoT, according to Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development. Kurian spoke during the company’s CloudWorld keynote in New York, which focused largely on demonstrating the benefits of cloud, automation, and artificial intelligence.
With the rise of automation, the combination of IoT and smart sensors, big data analytics, augmented human-machine interfaces, and mobile devices is giving way to the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0.
Blockchain takes functions in a company or between companies that are highly centralized and allows you to distribute them on a distributed transaction platform, said Kurian. Oracle is working with customers in financial services to help use blockchain for inter-company transactions and is also working with customers in retail to allow them to build loyalty networks, and working with companies in discrete manufacturing, and in logistics where they want to “liquefy” the supply chain and enable the entire flow to occur over a blockchain.
In Oracle’s view, said Kurian, blockchain technology supports a range of enterprise initiatives such as paperless transactions and intercompany reconciliation, and offers applicability to a variety of different domains.
Another key area is IoT. Oracle's general view is that everything in the world will eventually be digitized, said Kurian. “Everything in the world can be monitored and we provide a suite of IoT applications to allow monitoring of assets, people, and things.”
To watch on demand videos from Oracle CloudWorld New York 2018, go to https://www.oracle.com/cloudworld/newyork/on-demand.html?bcid=5737371585001&shareURL=http://www.oracle.com.