In the Australasian business landscape, resilience has become more than a virtue — it's a defining characteristic. As the challenges of macroeconomic pressures, skills shortages, cyber threats, and geopolitical instability persist, businesses across the continent continue to showcase an inspiring ability to innovate and overcome. 

Having personally witnessed such tenacity since taking the helm at Oracle in Australia and New Zealand a year ago, I've seen a narrative of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and unyielding optimism. Oracle works with many organisations that have made great strides over the past year, despite the challenges — or perhaps because of them. 

With challenge comes opportunity, and as problems arise, digital technology takes its place at the centre of the business landscape, providing the solutions enabling it to overcome them. However, an appetite among businesses for innovation is still needed to accomplish real change. Fortunately, this is something we, as a business community, have in great abundance. 

An innovation pipeline to be proud of

The innovation we’re seeing among Oracle’s customers in Australia and New Zealand is incredible, and much of it is supported and driven by the innovation within Oracle itself. When it comes to innovation to help businesses solve their challenges, Oracle hasn’t let up for a second. 

At Oracle CloudWorld ’23 in Las Vegas, we announced a range of new products and updates to help solve today's most complex business problems. For instance, we struck expanded partnerships with fellow innovators such as NVIDIA and Red Hat to support new workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and introduced important new multicloud capabilities. We also announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft to deliver Oracle database services on OCI in Microsoft Azure, helping organisations accelerate their migration to the cloud, so they can modernise their IT environments and take advantage of Azure’s infrastructure, tooling, and services. 

One local organisation making the most of our OCI innovation is the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which last year launched a nationwide Electronic Health Record (EHR) powered by Oracle Autonomous Database, running on OCI, streamlining clinical information collection and analysis. 

For Ryan Klose, the Royal Flying Doctor Service’s chief information officer, the move brings the organisation closer to its destination of being a fast, frictionless, and comfortable healthcare experience for patients in the outback and remote Australia.

“By using Oracle Autonomous Database, we’ve been able to digitise and consolidate our medical records systems. As a result, we have improved the accuracy, accessibility, and security of information for better continuity of care,” Klose says.

Innovation and investment in ANZ

Meanwhile, Oracle’s investment in cloud infrastructure continues. Our footprint now boasts 48 public cloud regions in 24 countries, including the launch last year of Oracle Cloud for the Australian Government and Defence in Canberra to meet demand from government organisations.

With over 100 services on offer, the new region claims a completed IRAP assessment at the PROTECTED level to provide assurance to Australian public sector organisations that Oracle Cloud for the Australian Government and Defence adheres to appropriate security controls.

According to Andrew Barr, chief minister and treasurer of the ACT Government, the cloud region is an important addition to Canberra’s digital infrastructure and “adds to the depth and breadth of the capabilities that our cyber security sector can offer”. 

We’re also expanding our distributed cloud offering with the addition of Oracle Alloy, a cloud infrastructure platform that enables service providers, integrators, independent software vendors, and other organisations to customise cloud services and experiences for their customers, and ANZ is leading the charge.

New Zealand-based TEAM IM was one of the first adopters of the Alloy offering, with the Kiwi information management services provider set to launch TEAM Cloud, the country’s first locally owned and operated hyperscale cloud, giving customers added data residency and digital sovereignty while bolstering resilience through robust disaster recovery.

“We stand ready to assist public sector, commercial and iwi organisations in navigating the intricacies of the digital landscape and optimising their digital transformations,” says Ian Rogers, chief executive officer of TEAM IM.

AI paves the way

Additionally, we’ve brought AI enhancements to products and services across our portfolio to pass on new capabilities, valuable to our customers everywhere. Recently we announced the general availability of Generative AI across the technology stack to enable enterprise AI adoption at scale.

The new generative AI service, hosted on OCI, aims to support large language models (LLMs) to help organisations automate end-to-end business processes, improve decision-making and enhance customer experiences — all while keeping organisational data secure and private.

We continue improving our AI offerings with several recent enhancements, such as the Oracle Digital Assistant, allowing businesses to incorporate data from large language models (LLMs) along with their enterprise data into chat experiences. There are many more such AI-based capabilities to come. 

This innovation is driven, first and foremost, by our customers and their needs. Helping customers solve challenges for real-world outcomes is our north star at Oracle. So stay tuned for much more innovation and collaboration aimed at solving challenges and enabling business success.