Where and how? That’s the question everyone is asking about AI

Lalit Malik, group vice president, Alliances & Channels, APAC, Oracle believes that Oracle’s AI Customer Excellence Center enables both partners and customers to move forward in their AI journey.

Oracle AI World Tour in Singapore witnessed many AI success stories shared by customers and partners in the region. However, most of these success stories started with the question of where and how to begin. While most customer use cases were co-developed with tech partners, some also focused directly on developing them with Oracle.

There is no doubt that Singapore is seeing the fastest adoption and deployment of AI use cases. Yet, there are also still many businesses that are still looking at where and how they can start their AI journey.

According to Lalit Malik, group vice president, Alliances & Channels, APAC, Oracle, the tech company’s AI Customer Excellence Center was built to serve this exact purpose. Customers can come and learn how they can begin their AI journey or even see what they can do next in their AI journey. But what makes the CEC unique is that partners can also come to utilize it to enable their AI capabilities and develop solutions for their customers.

“When we started this journey around AI, in our heads we thought probably the technology organizations would be the ones which will adopt. But we were very pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest we got from every industry, even industries like retail, construction, public sector, highly regulated insurance, banking and such. There is so much demand and there is so much interest. But the key is where and how,” Malik said.

This is where he believes the CEC fits perfectly as well as the readiness that Oracle offers through its enablement programs like Oracle University and technical accelerators for partners.

For EK Goh, vice president and general manager, Alliance and Channels ASEAN, Oracle, there are basically three aspects for businesses when it comes to doing AI. First, it's really about solving business problems and not technical problems. This is where he believes the ASEAN way of ensuring customers and partners the value of AI is through visible AI.

“We want customers to believe what they see, and not just what they hear. They can create an AI application very fast using Oracle HCI. But the gravity of the AI is in the data. And that's where they can use Oracle MCP to collect the data, to get the contextual data, and add agentic AI to that. To promote the idea of visible AI, we went around the different countries in ASEAN to conduct what we call AI Experience Live, where the customers and partners come and code their AI within four hours.” Goh explained.

Goh shared the second part is about working with partners who co-funding Oracle in the CEC. This includes big partners like Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and such that have also brought customers to the center and developed AI cases. The third aspect is the partnership Oracle has with the government. In Singapore, Oracle is part of the Enterprise Compute Initiative Program, whereby they partner with 10 partners, both SIs and ISVs, who will bring customers with an AI idea to Oracle. The government then funds 70% of the initiative while the customer pays the balance 30%.

“Oracle provides a whole bunch of support, training, free credit and more. We want the customer and the partners to use the funding opportunity to basically ideate what they want for their AI and to make it a reality. So these three are helping us increase the momentum, not just in AI, but also with partners,” he said.

Oracle as an AI native company

Malik also believes that one of the reasons why there has been so much momentum is because Oracle is an AI native company.

“So, if you look at Oracle Fusion as an example, there are thousand plus agents that are available today, are they're not bolted and available at no extra cost. What we want partners to do is take this innovation to customers, work with us, enable yourselves, and take this innovation to customers. Our strategy is very fundamentally different as we bring AI to your data,” he said.

Malik pointed out that if organizations moved data elsewhere, there are two issues they need to deal with: the security of the data and the egress cost of moving the data.

“The approach that we've taken is the AI data platform approach. So your data can come from any source, Oracle database, non-Oracle database, structured database data, unstructured data, Oracle application, non-Oracle application, but have a unified platform strategy. That's what we're going with our partners and through our partners to our customers. We have that unified platform architecture story and then build on top of that the LLMs to get that outcome, to get that insight,” he added.

For Malik, this is fundamentally different to what some of the other hyperscalers are doing.

“At the infrastructure level, such as the bare metal services, the non-blocking RDMA technology that we're using, the GPUs, all of that strength is so strong and hence customers are with us. That it is the uniqueness that Oracle has in terms of the stack, and then our strategy to embed AI in every layer is the differentiator, which is driving the momentum from both partners as well as from customers,” he explained.

Another area that’s driving the momentum is the multi-cloud whereby Oracle has its own OCI into the data center of the hyperscalers.

“So for example, you can run the application on Azure, Kubernetes on Azure, and your database on Oracle co-located into their data center. And since they're co-located, the latency is almost very low to a minimum. And then it's the same control panel for the client. It's the same set of governance security. You don't have to change anything. And in terms of contracting as well, both sides can continue to use the same context. So we made it easy, both for clients as well as for our partners to work together with us,” he said.

Malik added that Oracle is seeing a very significant increase in its pipeline in all the regions in these three areas, including multi-cloud.

Given these capabilities from Oracle, Malik hopes partners will continue to innovate and bring innovation to customers.

“That's very important. Build and go innovate with us. Engage early, bring customer problems through to their own excellence center, because most of these partners, especially the larger ones, have their own excellent centers as well. And collaborate with us in our CECs as we've got resources, infrastructure, environments, everything available,” Malik concluded.