Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, held from October 13 to 16, 2025 marked a major reset in the company’s positioning as it continues to integrate AI into every layer of its technology stack, Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst, at Technology Business Review, said in a note.
The Oracle AI World event reinforced a clear message: AI changes everything. Oracle backed this message with real customer deployments in healthcare, hospitality and financial services, along with new product launches and updates to its growing AI ecosystem.
A highlight was the introduction of Oracle AI Data Platform and next generation AI agents embedded across Oracle Applications. Oracle also shared notable projections for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), signaling a much larger role for OCI within the company’s future revenue mix.
A major portion of upcoming AI revenue is already represented in Oracle’s RPO (remaining performance obligations) contract backlog of $455 billion, showing how strongly enterprises are committing to Oracle’s AI roadmap. Oracle earlier said Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue will reach $18 billion this fiscal year — and $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the subsequent four years.
A recent IDC report said spending on AI infrastructure is forecast to reach $758 billion by 2029. CIOs of organizations increased spending on compute and storage hardware infrastructure for AI deployments by 166 percent to $82 billion in the second quarter of 2025.
OCI’s Growing Role as Oracle’s Strategic Differentiator
The year 2025 has been transformative for Oracle. The Stargate Project pushed RPO to more than 450 billion dollars, while a leadership shift brought two product executives into the co-CEO roles. Both developments are intended to accelerate Oracle’s AI-first direction.
Historically, OCI was considered the missing piece in Oracle’s application and database portfolio. Today, OCI has matured into a scalable and cost-efficient cloud platform that is projected to contribute nearly 70 percent of Oracle’s revenue by FY29, compared to only 22 percent today. This shift strengthens Oracle’s ability to deliver enterprise AI at scale.
For AI-driven workloads, Oracle now offers a unified stack: cost-effective compute, operational applications data, and a tightly integrated AI-database layer. The goal is to move enterprises toward more advanced reasoning models and help them build AI systems grounded in structured business data.
Oracle Simplifies PaaS, But the Database Remains Its Key Advantage
Oracle’s Platform-as-a-Service simplification is in line with broader industry trends, but the database continues to be Oracle’s primary competitive edge. The company is moving toward a vision where analytics workloads sit closer to the operational database, reducing data duplication and improving performance.
A major step in this direction is the introduction of Autonomous Data Lakehouse. Built as an evolution of Autonomous Data Warehouse, this new service is fully integrated with Oracle Database. It supports open data formats like Apache Iceberg and works with engines such as Spark, allowing organizations to read and write data across diverse environments while preserving flexibility.
The message is clear: adopting a converged data architecture does not mean being locked in. Oracle now enables customers to work with data originating from multiple operational databases, cloud data warehouses, streaming pipelines and big data platforms.
Oracle is also showing readiness to support data from external applications. The launch of native Salesforce integration within Fusion Data Intelligence last year hinted at this shift. If Oracle continues expanding PaaS capabilities beyond its own applications, it could unlock significant opportunities across the broader enterprise market.
Moving Beyond the Traditional ‘Red-Stack’ Approach
One of the biggest changes Oracle showcased at AI World is its evolving stance on open standards. For years, the industry resisted fully open architectures, but the rise of AI has made unified data access across tools a necessity. Oracle fully embraced this change.
A key gap in multi-engine architectures has been governance and cataloging, especially when working with Iceberg tables. Oracle addressed this by launching a data catalog integrated into Autonomous Data Lakehouse. Importantly, this catalog can interoperate with the leading catalogs in the market: AWS Glue, Databricks Unity Catalog and Snowflake Polaris.
This means customers can access Iceberg tables across these platforms and run queries directly within Oracle systems. The ability to run multiple engines on the same data is rapidly becoming the new normal, and Oracle’s approach aligns with the direction modern data architectures are heading.
Oracle’s introduction of the Autonomous Data Lakehouse created the foundation for one of its most significant announcements at Oracle AI World 2025: the launch of the AI Data Platform. This platform brings together Oracle’s unified data layer and a modern app development environment, combining Autonomous Data Lakehouse, Oracle Database, AI models, analytics tools and machine learning frameworks into a single development experience.
Designed as a new PaaS service on OCI, AI Data Platform integrates existing OCI capabilities to offer customers one entry point for building AI on unified enterprise data. Although the idea of merging data and development layers is not new, Oracle is positioning its approach as deeply differentiated through its operational database.
Competitors such as Microsoft, with Fabric, and Amazon Web Services, with its 2024 launch of SageMaker AI, are leveraging the lakehouse model and integrated model tuning tools. Oracle, however, benefits from customers’ ability to connect directly to contextualized enterprise data that already resides in Oracle Database, a clear advantage for LLM-driven workloads.
Oracle Evolves Into a Full Hyperscaler, Prompting a Shift in Partner Strategy
AI Data Platform also highlights a broader shift in Oracle’s cloud identity. As OCI matures and Oracle becomes more comparable to a hyperscaler, both the company and its partners must adjust.
Customers increasingly expect a single, consistent data and AI foundation, rather than navigating multiple services to complete routine tasks. Reflecting this shift, six of Oracle’s leading systems integrator partners are investing a combined $1.5 billion to train more than 8,000 practitioners on AI Data Platform. This signals the ecosystem’s recognition that Oracle’s data and AI strategy is becoming central to enterprise cloud transformation.
However, systems integrators face a challenge. For years they have invested heavily in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Research from TBR’s Cloud Ecosystem Report shows that ten major SIs collectively generated more than $45 billion in revenue from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform practices in 2024. Reframing Oracle as a hyperscaler, rather than primarily a SaaS vendor, will require new incentives, deeper knowledge management and different engagement models.
The advantage for Oracle is that AI Data Platform is available across the major hyperscalers. This opens immediate opportunities for integration, configuration and customization, pulling more AI workloads into Oracle’s ecosystem. Over time, it will also test partners’ ability to deliver value on OCI’s underutilized PaaS layer and Oracle’s willingness to support that evolution.
OCI’s Rise and the Shifting Role of SaaS in Oracle’s Strategy
Oracle’s cloud mix is undergoing a dramatic change. OCI and PaaS services such as AI Data Platform are becoming larger contributors to overall cloud revenue. Oracle expects the next quarter, FY2Q26, to be the turning point when IaaS revenue surpasses SaaS.
Much of this IaaS momentum is driven by AI infrastructure customers choosing Oracle for cost efficient compute. Oracle already has more than 700 AI infrastructure customers, with annual contract revenue growing in triple digits year over year.
Even as OCI accelerates, Oracle’s applications remain essential because operational enterprise data continues to be the core differentiator in Oracle’s AI strategy. At Oracle AI World, the company highlighted more than 600 AI agents and assistants across its applications portfolio, spanning both Fusion and industry applications. These agents remain free for all 2,400 customers currently using AI features in Oracle applications.
Industry applications will play an even larger role going forward. With former Industry Apps leader Mike Sicilia now serving as co CEO, Oracle is positioning its applications portfolio as a unified SaaS layer rather than separating Fusion and Industry. This reflects how customers are prioritizing measurable industry outcomes from GenAI investments. Industry data is also becoming a strategic asset for customers tuning their own models.
Will Oracle Redefine Pricing Around Industry Outcomes?
Oracle’s emphasis on industry specific outcomes raises an important question: how far will Oracle go in aligning its SaaS pricing with the value those outcomes deliver? More than twenty years ago, Salesforce transformed the enterprise software market by pioneering the SaaS subscription model. The next major disruption could come from a vendor willing to link pricing directly to measurable business outcomes.
Rajani Baburajan
