Oracle Updates Autonomous Cloud Services, Data Integration

The latest version of the Oracle Cloud Platform released June 13 features a range of built-in autonomous capabilities, including the Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise, Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud, and Oracle API Platform Cloud. These new features builds on the software giant’s introduction last fall of its Autonomous Database, a self-monitoring system that automatically finds and applies patches and regularly tunes itself for optimum performance. The new Mobile Cloud Enterprise makes it easier for developers to add features such as chatbots for customer interaction via popular services such as Facebook Messenger and Amazon Alexa. Oracle said it’s easier because MCE takes care of the time-consuming task of integrating these messaging platforms with the chatbot. “We also use natural language processing to understand the user’s intent as part of our dialog engine so the developer doesn’t need to code for every type of end user,” Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management at Oracle, told eWEEK. “We can help manage the conversation as it goes along because the chatbot understands the sentiment of the conversation. Also, it will hand off to a human if the customer doesn’t understand something or the customer is, say, getting ticked off.”  In an enterprise setting Agarwal said the chatbot’s integration with either Software as a Service or on-premises applications helps it work more effectively. “There is intelligent interaction between you and the system so if you say, for example, I need a new laptop, the system shows the three laptops you are eligible to procure and walks you through the transaction,” he said.