Analyst(s): Brad Shimmin, Ron Westfall
Publication Date: April 16, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- The 2025 Oracle Database Analyst Summit highlighted advancements across various fields, showcasing the dynamic progression of its worldwide enterprise software and cloud ecosystems.
- Oracle demonstrates why it is paving the way in fulfilling customer demand for multi-cloud flexibility.
- Oracle highlighted the inherent value of adopting a unified database management system that combines disparate data types beneath a single query and processing engine.
The News: The annual Oracle Database Analyst Summit in Redwood City, CA, brought together industry analysts to interact with Oracle executives and learn how the database powerhouse intends to conquer the AI opportunity.
Oracle Database Analyst Summit 2025: Let AI Reign O’er Data
Analyst Take: The 2025 Oracle Database Analyst Summit highlighted remarkable advancements across various fields, showcasing the dynamic progression of worldwide enterprise software, AI, and cloud ecosystems. From our perspective, AI plays a fundamental role in how technology vendors are positioning their portfolios and how organizations are selecting solutions.
Generative AI (GenAI) in particular is widely viewed as the technology essential to driving database ecosystem innovation for the foreseeable future. It underpins progress in key areas such as optimizing AI for data workloads and, conversely, optimizing data for AI workloads, multi-cloud innovation, and strengthening vertical use cases. Key takeaways from insightful and thoughtful conversations at the event demonstrate why.
We find Oracle has bolstered its multi-cloud business, database, and AI-supportive solutions by leveraging several key technology innovations along with strategic alliances that align with customer needs, industry trends, and technological advancements. For example, Oracle has already established partnerships such as Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle Database@AWS, and Oracle Database@Google Cloud. These partner-hosted implementations of Oracle’s highly converged Oracle Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) put the vendor in a very unique position, not as a direct rival of AWS, Google, and Microsoft, but rather as an oasis of highly performant and highly differentiated data, analytics, and AI capabilities tightly aligned with surrounding partner cloud resources.
Converged Database in the Spotlight
Throughout the event, Oracle highlighted the inherent value of adopting a unified database management system capable of combining disparate data types beneath a single query and processing engine. The idea is very straightforward and has served the company well over the last few years. Why build, integrate, and maintain several best-of-breed databases, each dedicated to a single data type such as geospatial, time series, tabular, graph, vector, etc., when you can provision a single database that can manage all of those data types under a single control plane? Doing so can bestow several benefits, including:
- Doing away with data movement costs by simply representing the same underlying data in different ways
- Minimizing exposure to security and privacy concerns via unified data access controls
- Simplifying API access for developers, as mentioned above
- Reducing overall solution latency through a tightly integrated hardware/software stack
- Reducing data management costs with Oracle Autonomous Database, which automates most typical manual database functions
- Avoiding data fragmentation and attempts at trying to maintain data consistency between vector databases and core business databases
Throughout the conference, Oracle attributed these benefits to decades of investment in building a mission-critical technology stack that’s best-of-breed at every level—yet engineered to work as a single solution. By fully integrating this stack, the vendor has been steadily bringing more and more unique functionality into the database itself without degrading performance at scale.
For example, in May 2024, Oracle launched Oracle Database 23ai. This release featured a robust vector search capability, branded AI Vector Search, which makes it possible for LLMs to query private business data using a natural language interface and helps LLMs provide more accurate and relevant results, allowing developers to easily add semantic search capabilities to both new applications and existing applications. Importantly, with this capability, Oracle Database 23ai brings AI algorithms to where the data lives, freeing customers from having to move the data to where the AI algorithm lives. This allows AI to run in real-time in Oracle databases and greatly improves the effectiveness, efficiency, and security of AI.
This release also introduced a unique ability, JSON Relational Duality Views, which basically allows developers to both read and write data stored across multiple relational tables as though it were a single JSON-structured document. This stands as a boon for developers as they no longer have to choose a single data model for their data. They simply access data in the format that best suits their needs.
JSON data is just one of many representations of the same underlying data for Oracle. This approach is well-aligned with two important market trends. First, companies strive to consolidate their database landscape to reduce management and data replication/movement costs. Second, JSON data structures are now the preferred data model used in building AI applications, particularly agentic AI solutions, where discrete models and tools must access and exchange data in a reliable manner.
Customer Panel Shows Impressive Vector Search Adoption and Gaining Multi-cloud Interest
To illustrate, Oracle invited several customers to the stage to discuss their experiences with the vendor’s converged database philosophy. Keeping with current market interest in grounding GenAI models using corporate data, Oracle customers discussed a broad swath of use cases built on top of in-database AI capabilities. One company, for example, helps media producers make large amounts of media searchable and discoverable using Oracle AI Vector Search. Conversely, a biotech company identifies bacterial infections and resistance profiles using AI-driven DNA sequencing in order to target appropriate treatments, reducing the time to diagnose antibiotic resistance from five days to less than four hours.
Lastly, a LATAM e-commerce provider uses vector search to provide personalized search recommendations to shoppers. While many Oracle customers cited performance and scale as two chief drivers in adopting the company’s vector capabilities, this company went so far as to say that Oracle helped them break through a bottleneck in vectorizing tens of millions of products. Specifically, their home-grown solution could only handle ten to twenty dimensions, not thousands, as required to provide experience-based recommendations and infer future customer intent.
Looking Ahead
Overall, Futurum finds that Oracle is well-positioned to leverage its unique architectural approach to data management, AI, and cloud services in tackling current and future enterprise demand for more efficient ways of leveraging data and new ways of building data platforms. We anticipate further compelling innovations from the Oracle Database Engineering Team this year, with an eye towards AI everywhere.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Oracle Exadata X11M: The Enterprise AI Architecture
The Oracle & AWS Collaboration: A True Hybrid Multi-Cloud World Takes Shape
MWC 2025: Qualcomm and IBM Raise GenAI Competitive Stakes
Author Information
Brad Shimmin is Vice President and Practice Lead, Data and Analytics at Futurum. He provides strategic direction and market analysis to help organizations maximize their investments in data and analytics. Currently, Brad is focused on helping companies establish an AI-first data strategy.
With over 30 years of experience in enterprise IT and emerging technologies, Brad is a distinguished thought leader specializing in data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and enterprise software development. Consulting with Fortune 100 vendors, Brad specializes in industry thought leadership, worldwide market analysis, client development, and strategic advisory services.
Brad earned his Bachelor of Arts from Utah State University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. Brad lives in Longmeadow, MA, with his beautiful wife and far too many LEGO sets.
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
