Oracle OpenWorld 2019 has just wrapped yesterday, and if there is a single word that can describe my impressions of it, that would be “different”. Immediately noticeable was the absence of the traditional Oracle Red spilling into the streets around the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the reason behind it is the new corporate design system called Redwood. You can already see its colors and patterns applied to the company’s website, but more importantly, it defines new UI controls for Oracle applications and cloud services.

Design, however, is by far not the Oracle’s biggest change. It appears that the company has finally reached the stage where a radical cultural shift is inevitable. To adapt to the latest market challenges and to extend the reach towards new customer demographics, Oracle needs to seriously reconsider many of its business practices, just like Microsoft did years ago. And looking at the announcements of this year’s OOW, the company is already making major strides in the right direction.

It’s an open secret that for years, Oracle has been struggling to position itself as one of the leading cloud service providers. Unfortunately, for a latecomer to this market, playing catch-up with more successful competitors is always a losing strategy. It took the company some time to realize that, and now Oracle is trying a different game: learning from others’ mistakes, understanding the challenges and requirements of modern enterprises, and in the end offering a lean, yet complete stack of cloud services that provide the highest level of performance, comprehensive security and compliance controls and, last but not least, intelligent automation for any business process.

The key concept in this vision for Oracle is “autonomy”. To eliminate human labor from cloud management is to eliminate human error, thus preventing the most common reason for data breaches. Last year, we’ve seen the announcement of the self-patching and self-tuning Autonomous Database. This time, Autonomous Linux has been presented – an operating system that can update itself (including kernel patches) without downtime. It seems that the company’s strategic vision is to make every service in their cloud autonomous in the same sense as well. Combined with the Generation 2 cloud infrastructure designed specifically to eliminate many network-based attack vectors, this provides additional weight to Oracle’s claim of having a cloud ready to run the most business-critical workloads.

Oracle Data Safe, a cloud-based service that improves Oracle database security by identifying risky configuration, users and sensitive data, which allows customers to closely monitor user activities and ensure data protection and compliance for their cloud databases, has been announced as well. Now Oracle cloud databases now include a straightforward, easy to use and free service that helps customers protect their sensitive data from security threats and compliance violations.

It is also worth noting that the company is finally starting to think “outside of the box” with regards to their business strategy as well; or rather outside of the “Oracle ecosystem” bubble. Strategic partnerships with Microsoft (to establish low-latency interconnections between Azure and Oracle Cloud datacenters) and VMware (to allow businesses lift and shift their entire VMware stacks to the cloud while maintaining full control over them, impossible in other public clouds) demonstrate this major paradigm shift in the company’s cloud roadmap.

Even more groundbreaking is arguably the introduction of the new always free tier for cloud services – which is exactly what it says on the lid: an opportunity for every developer, student or even a corporate IT worker to use Autonomous Databases, virtual machines, and other core cloud infrastructure services for an unlimited time. Of course, the offer is restricted by allocated resources, but all functional benefits are still there, and not just for testing. Hopefully, Oracle will soon start promoting these tools outside of Oracle events as well. Seen any APEX evangelists around recently?