“I think the biggest transformation I’ve seen is not just OCI but Oracle itself becoming a lot more cloud- and operations-focused,” said Pradeep Vincent, chief technical architect, Oracle, in an exclusive interview with AIM, adding that operations are one of the biggest value propositions of the cloud. 

Vincent joined the company a decade ago and is one of the founding members of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). He has been involved in the design and implementation of the cloud infrastructure, responsible for the engineering architecture group, and plays a key role in driving the development of OCI. 

Multi-Cloud Approach 

Vincent believes that OCI is pretty different from the competitors out there. “Our goal is to make it easy for customers to use multiple clouds, period,” he said, explaining that a key part of this is their ‘distributed cloud strategy’, putting the cloud where customers want it.

“There are a few different ways in which we are going about it, one of them is multi-cloud, with Oracle Database@Azure being one. We’re super excited about that,” he said.

Oracle, last year, announced Oracle Database@Azure, which delivers Oracle database services running on OCI inside Azure datacenters and gives customers more flexibility in where they run their workloads.

“I worked on the engineering architecture behind the scenes for that. It’s truly impressive,” said Vincent, adding that they essentially took OCI itself, creating a small OCI site inside the Azure Data Centre and connecting it to OCI. 

Simultaneously, it was wired directly to the Azure network. It is only a matter of time before OCI is integrated with GCP and AWS. “Cloud should be open,” said chief technology officer Larry Ellison.  

 OCI’s Architecture 

Vincent is confident in the networking architecture of OCI. “I believe our super clusters are exceptionally powerful. Customers frequently tell us that when they try other cloud providers, including OCI, they observe a significant difference in networking technology,” he said. 

He further explained that good networking facilitates proper utilisation of GPUs. “GPUs are very pricey. If you think about LLM training, many of them actually run like 40 to 60% utilisation of the GPUs,” he said, adding that although networking comes with a cost, it provides a 10x value in terms of GPU savings.

OCI Stands for Security

“OCI is secure by default, which means it embeds security features as a built-in aspect. It’s not like buying a product where you have to add an extra pack for security, here, it’s integrated from the beginning,” said Vincent.

OCI provides a variety of features to help you secure your network, such as subnet network filtering, firewalls, and security lists. Moreover, OCI offers a variety of data encryption options, both at rest and in transit. This helps to protect your data from unauthorized access, even if it is intercepted.

Vincent explained that Oracle doesn’t make a network public by default. Users have the option to make it public if they choose to. However, he cautioned that a common issue arises when customers unknowingly leak data into the public cloud by creating public buckets.

“Our security story is not just about infrastructure or apps but goes end-to-end. Advanced security functionalities like Identity & Access Management and Cloud Guard cut across most threats. And that’s a huge differentiator as far as this is concerned,” said Vincent. 

Generative AI in OCI 

Oracle recently embedded generative AI capabilities into the complete SaaS suite, which include applications like ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX. Additionally, OCI offers models from Cohere and Meta for various tasks such as writing, summarisation, analysis, and chat, without requiring extensive training from scratch.

“The way I look at generative AI is that it is a very novel and creative way to use data. But it’s not necessarily accurate on its own every single day,” said Vincent, adding that generative AI will enhance use cases but not necessarily replace all. 

Speaking from Oracle’s perspective, he said the company is focusing on expanding data centres to meet the demand for generative AI services. “We offer many unique services, including cluster networks with support for remote direct memory access (RDMA),”  said Vincent. He further mentioned that Oracle internally uses generative AI for customer support.

When asked about his motivation, he shared, “There’s a lot of customer problems to be solved, lots of innovation that’s happening. So I’m excited and privileged to be part of it.”