LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The "open multi-cloud era begins" could be the main takeaway of the recently concluded Oracle CloudWorld 2024. As the simple fact that many in the enterprise market now use multi-cloud platforms. There are four large-scale infrastructure companies that have big cloud offerings: AWS, Microsoft's Azure, Google, and Oracle. With this come a lot of different cloud applications. Customers typically use one, two, or even three of these different cloud infrastructures using dozens of applications. But those cloud platforms don't work well together. Well, at least until today. "Before this was called Cloud World, it was called Oracle Open World. And we called it open because the Oracle database ran on all sorts of computers. We coexisted with different applications. Lots of applications from different vendors ran on Oracle. It was the whole idea that customers had a lot of choices. They could choose computers, choose operating systems, databases, applications, and mix and match those," said Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle Corporation, in his keynote on Tuesday, September 10 at the annual Oracle CloudWorld 2024. "Now, as we're well into the cloud era, we're entering a new phase where services on different clouds work gracefully together. The clouds are becoming open. They're no longer walled gardens. Customers will have choices and can use multiple clouds together." Oracle announced its new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) distributed cloud innovations to meet the rapidly growing global demand for its AI and cloud services. The latest innovations span Oracle Database@AWS, Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle Database@Google Cloud, OCI Dedicated Region, and OCI Supercluster. With Oracle's distributed cloud, their customers can deploy OCI's 150+ AI and cloud services at the edge, in their own datacenter, across clouds, or in the public cloud and can help address a variety of data privacy, sovereign AI, and low latency requirements. "Our priority is giving customers the choice and flexibility to leverage cloud services in the model that makes the most sense for their business," said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "With OCI's distributed cloud capabilities, we're helping customers deploy a dedicated cloud in a small, scalable footprint, build applications with the best services across cloud providers, and deploy AI infrastructure anywhere they want. This flexibility helps our customers address their unique needs and support their cloud investments in delivering significant business value." Groundbreaking partnerships OCI now enables customers to combine cloud services from multiple clouds to "optimize cost, functionality, and performance." With Oracle Database@AWS, Oracle Database@Azure, and Oracle Database@Google Cloud, customers gain direct access to Oracle Database services running on OCI and deployed directly in the datacenters of the four largest hyperscalers. "As far back as 2008, customers could run their Oracle workloads in the cloud, and since then, many of the world's largest and most security-sensitive organizations have chosen to deploy their Oracle software on AWS," said Matt Garman, chief executive at AWS. "This new, deeper partnership will provide Oracle Database services within AWS to allow customers to take advantage of the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of the world's most widely adopted cloud alongside enterprise software they rely on." "Customers can now combine Oracle databases and applications running on OCI with Google Cloud's industry-leading infrastructure, data, and AI capabilities," said Andi Gutmans, vice president and general manager of databases, Google Cloud. "This enables enterprises to more rapidly migrate to the cloud and accelerate their transformative generative AI journeys with services such as Vertex AI." "In today's complex and rapidly evolving business landscape, a one-size-fits-all cloud solution simply isn't enough to meet the diverse needs of modern enterprises," said Brett Tanzer, vice president of product management at Microsoft. "Through our partnership with Oracle, we're expanding Oracle Database@Azure and helping more customers respond to market shifts and maintain a competitive edge as they grow, and their needs evolve." Through these partnerships, according to Oracle, "customers have the flexibility to run their applications across clouds and combine all the benefits of Oracle Database services with services from other cloud providers for a seamless multi-cloud experience." In addition, customers benefit from the "simplicity, security, and low latency of a unified operating environment." "We are seeing huge demand from customers that want to use multiple clouds," said Ellison. "To meet this demand and give customers the choice and flexibility they want. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deployed inside these data centers, we can provide customers with the best possible database and network performance."