Oracle’s Larry Ellison introduced the Generation 2 Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 yesterday with a primary emphasis on security. “Other clouds have been around for a long time, and they were not designed for the enterprise,” Ellison said. “We will never put our cloud control code in the same computer that has customer code.”

Oracle’s focus on security was also the theme of statements made by Oracle CEO Mark Hurd in an interview today:

Three Big Things in the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud… Security, Security, Security

It isn’t just AWS, there’s a broad set of breaches across the industry. The level of sophistication of the attacks is ever increasing, so just as our capabilities to defend are increasing so are the ability to attack. Larry’s (Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison) message started with three big things in Gen 2, security, security, security. He really hit home on the security side.

In addition to that, we focused on the evolution of our database technology, which is just as important in the context of the entire Gen 2 approach. This is the most exciting database release we’ve had in concert with Gen 2 in the history of the company. This autonomous self-driving database.

The Autonomous Self-Driving Database

When we release a patch to the database of a vulnerability that gets patched it typically takes six to nine months for our customers to implement those through their entire ecosystem. This now gets done automatically. You automatically get the protection of the patch with the push of a button.

The ability now to do this, the ability now to auto-tune the database, these are huge improvements in the database that we’ve never seen before in concert with Gen 2.

Apps Are 25-30 Percent of the Business

Apps are about 25 to 30 percent of the business. It’s growing double digits, that’s a holistic number for the applications business across all of Oracle whether it’s our support, SAS, and SAS is, of course, driving all of that plus some. Now in TAC what we did in Q2 of last year we introduced a concept called bring your own license (BYOL). That had the effect of making a license portable, whether using in your data center or whether you’re using it in the cloud.

The impact of that was our license revenue actually went up. People decided to buy more of those licenses the traditional way if you would for a couple of reasons. One is our customers have a hard time predicting the workload that’ll be on-premise versus the cloud. Will it change four or five percent? I don’t know. Therefore, I’ll buy a traditional license which caused our licenses to go up and what you would think of as our non-SAS platform revenue to actually not grow as fast as it was previously.

Oracle Will Have Data Center Capabilities in the Middle East.

The Middle East as a region is a very strong region for Oracle and we will have a data center in the Middle East. Whether that’s in UAE, whether that’s in some other part of the Middle East, we’ll see. But we will put a data center capability in the Middle East. We always like to have all the facts (Regarding the Kashoggi allegations) before we jump to any conclusions. We have some and certainly, we’ll look to get all those facts. That said if some of these things were true obviously that would be of great concern to us.

Again, it’s an important region for us and I don’t want to take one action and paint a picture across an entire region. There’s an entire region of very good customers and we will have some data center capabilities in the Middle East.