Dive Brief:

• Oracle is boosting its autonomous cloud capabilities in anticipation of an emerging enterprise IT landscape where successful organizations will have "full end-to-end automation," the company said in a statement Tuesday. The company's push centers around making its portfolio of cloud services "self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing" for operational functions like patching, backups and upgrades. 
• The move toward autonomous offerings hinges on the belief that businesses' back-end operations are facing an autonomous future. Oracle expects more than 50% of business data workloads to run autonomously by 2020, according to CEO Mark Hurd, who spoke at Oracle CloudWorld in New York Monday, ZDnet reports. As part of that, the company expects 90% of business applications to contain AI. 
• While Oracle is increasing its cloud capabilities, it's also increasing its geographic footprint. Monday, the company also announced the addition of 12 data center regions, with new locations in Asia, Europe, Canada and two in the U.S., which will support cloud workloads for the Department of Defense. 

Dive Insight:

Oracle has had a long-standing presence in enterprise IT, but its delays getting into the cloud meant competitors already captured the lion's share of the market. Amazon Web Services has maintained a firm lead, and in Q4 brought in more segment revenue than Microsoft, IBM, Google and Alibaba combined.

Larry Ellison, Oracle's executive chairman and CTO, has declared war on AWS' lead, however the company is playing catch up to far more mature services. One way to set itself apart is to look toward automation, offering advanced technical solutions for every workload. Increased regions, and the promise of lower latency, will also help grow its international cloud customer base. 

Oracle is wedged among a pack of cloud providers working to differentiate themselves, according to Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for IaaS. AWS and Microsoft are clear market leaders, and Google is on the verge of breaking out of the visionary segment.  

But since the Magic Quadrant has debuted, Oracle has released a slew of services, including an autonomous cloud database for data warehouse workloads. Now, it needs to convince its customer base to stick with its proprietary offerings instead of looking to transition to more open solutions.