I thought I would list the Big 3 (Oracle, Microsoft and VMWare) announcements from their recent annual conferences to remind me to go and study these new features early next year.
First up – Oracle OpenWorld.
Held in San Francisco back in September.

- Oracle has gone further in the stack with its Autonomous Database (self servicing database engine) by announcing Autonomous Oracle Linux.
Like the database it provisions itself, it scales itself, it tines itself, it patches itself while its running.
- Oracle is getting into the blockchain game. Kinda. They releasing a new kind of table called a blockchain table and when rows are inserted into a blockchain table it creates a cryptographic chain of the data, which clients can use to check for any kind of fraud.
- Oracle Cloud Applications Suite is getting some new features and updates, as well as rolling out Digital Assistants across the suite.
- New Oracle Exadata machine. 100Gbps network and direct access data stored in Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This makes I/O ten times faster than previous Exadata releases.
- Oracle will open another 20 “regions” for its cloud services by the end of 2020. 11 of these new regions will be duplicates of existing regionals, which will allow customers to setup DR systems with the same region.
Second up – VMWorld US .
Held in San Francisco in early September.

- Probably the announcement that I am most excited about is Project Pacific. In a nutshell, VMWare will embed Kubernetes into vSphere. This means that you can manage Kubernetes objects from the vSphere Client.
More information from Kit Colbert here.
- VMWare Cloud is now available on Dell EMC.
More information from Kit Colbert here.
- Dell EMC kit now comes with VMWare vSphere pre-installed and pre-activated with your license keys.
Lastly – Microsoft Ignite.
Held early November in Orlando, Florida.

- Azure Arc is the new control panel that organisations can leverage Azure to manage their resources across AWS and Google Cloud.
- Project Cortex is a knowledge network for your company. It uses Machine Learning to analyse all of your documents and contracts in various repositories and then surfaces them in Outlook, Teams and other Office Apps.
- SCCM and Intune Services are set to be combined and called Endpoint Manager going forward.
- Power Virtual Agents. The ‘no-code/low-code’ tool for building chatbots. It uses Azures machine learning.
- Azure Synapse Analytics. Big-data analytics with data warehousing.
- Web Based Visual Studio development environment is now live in preview.