Multi-cloud shift drives demand for AI-driven data integration

Providers are responding with collaboration, led by Oracle.

Businesses are shifting from single-cloud to multi-cloud environments to meet the increasing demand for integrated data solutions and to fully utilise the potential of generative AI, a key driver of cloud adoption.

“Cloud is now a given—it’s table stakes. The majority of our customers are running [their workloads] across not just a single cloud provider, but across multiple cloud providers” Chris Chelliah, senior vice president of Technology and Customer Strategy, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific told Asian Business Review in an exclusive interview.

This trend reflects a broader emphasis on AI, particularly generative AI, which requires substantial data and robust infrastructure—both provided by cloud environments.

“Generative AI is top of mind in every conversation we have with customers. Bringing data into the AI models is where we see a massive uptake in services,” Chelliah said. 

In response to this shift towards multi-cloud, Oracle has been collaborating with other cloud players, such as Microsoft and Google, to offer integrated solutions.

At the Oracle CloudWorld 2024, held in Las Vegas, Nevada from 9 to 12 September, the company announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

This partnership introduced Oracle Database@AWS, a service that allows users to access Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS.

The offering enables customers to connect enterprise data in their Oracle Database to applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Analytics services, and AWS’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services like Amazon Bedrock.

Chelliah said Oracle's multi-cloud solutions help businesses consolidate their data across different platforms, enabling them to achieve their desired outcomes, particularly with generative AI.

“Cloud services that bring untied data together, that can feed the learning algorithms and the generative AI algorithms have seen a massive uptake,” he added.

Generally, cloud services have seen a rapid uptake of adoption across all industries, including the financial and public sectors, even the constriction and utilities sectors, said the Oracle expert.

According to Chelliah, cloud adoption is unfolding in two primary ways. “First [has been] around building efficiencies and automation into existing systems within an organisation, within a particular sector. The second is around driving innovation for businesses, so reaching new markets, taking new products to market,” he said.