AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS and Oracle: Transforming Healthcare (HMC211)

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Overview

📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS and Oracle: Transforming Healthcare (HMC211)

In this video, Doug Palmer, Group Vice President at Oracle, discusses Oracle Database@AWS and its transformative impact on healthcare organizations. He addresses how 50 years of computing evolution created massive data silos that inhibit AI adoption, then explains how Oracle Database@AWS solves this by deploying Exadata hardware inside AWS data centers. Key use cases include modernizing from IaaS to managed database services, reuniting apps and databases in the cloud, and enabling enterprise AI by bringing models to data rather than moving data to models. The service offers 99.995% SLAs, supports Real Application Clusters (RAC), provides seamless migration from on-premises, and integrates directly into the AWS Management Console with zero latency difference from native AWS services.

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Main Part

Healthcare's Data Challenge: Breaking Down Silos in a 50-Year Legacy

Good morning, everybody. Hopefully you can hear me okay. It's a little bit loud in here. You can ask me to speak up if you need to. Welcome. If somebody had told me, I don't know, three or four years ago that I would be standing on a stage at the AWS conference talking about one of the largest market opportunities that I've seen in my 14 or 15 years at Oracle, I would have thought you were crazy. But here we are, and it's tremendous.

My name is Doug Palmer. I am a Group Vice President for Oracle's Data Platform Sales organization, servicing the largest healthcare and life sciences companies in the US. By healthcare, we mean the largest providers, payers, pharma, life sciences, and medical distribution companies. By data platform, we mean our on-premises, our cloud, hardware environment, and our licensed business in the US.

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about healthcare today, but I'm also going to focus really specifically on the partnership that is Oracle and AWS that probably a lot of folks did not see coming quite a few years ago and how it's unlocked a huge opportunity for our customers to capitalize on the massive data estate that lives and breathes in Oracle databases all over the world today. But I do want to start with the common problem that we see in almost every sector within the healthcare space.

Over the last five decades, whether it's from mainframe to the client server, internet, mobility, big data, all the way into cloud and AI, while the technology has modernized, we have created massive amounts of data and application silos across the organizations. Now, I see this in the largest healthcare providers in the US with thousands of applications, introducing tremendous cost and overhead in a sector that today is challenged with margin challenges, cost optimization, and resource constraints across the board.

Now, this same 50 years of computing paradigm that has led to this application and data sprawl has also inhibited us from capitalizing on the market momentum of AI. AI models require data, and they require good data. This application challenge has caused a ton of sprawl, a ton of data movement, and also introduced significant security risks and governance challenges, regardless of the sector you're in, whether it's the largest pharmaceutical organizations, payers, or life sciences.

Now, the data opportunity in healthcare, for example, is tremendous. In the top left, it is to gain visibility across all data for understanding things like population health, improving patient outcomes, and improving physicians' life experience. If you look to the right, more data sources equal better decision making and value. That is true, but it's also presented a massive challenge.

If I look at the vertical integration of the provider space from the primary care to the specialists to the acute and the ambulatory, it's a challenge to understand a patient journey when there's data in silos across everywhere. But the opportunity to focus on patient centricity and to provide a better patient experience and a better continuum of care is an opportunity that we are working on, and data is at the center of all of that.

If we look at connecting the data value chain and automating decisions, interoperability is one of the most important things for us in the healthcare space, whether we're talking about the providers, whether we're looking at the payers, or the policymakers to help focus on improving prior authorization, claims adjudication, real-time claims adjudication. And the data is at the heart of it all.

And then on the left, unifying data structures for lowering risk operations. We see this in the provider space tremendously, trying to understand cost and containment, physician cost, supply chain costs. And again, data is not being capitalized on the best today, given the sprawl across the board.

Oracle Database@AWS: Five Key Scenarios Transforming Cloud Strategy

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about what is this Oracle Database@AWS offering that Oracle has brought to the market. And I'm going to look at it from the lens of really four or five common scenarios that we've seen as we've deployed this in production for many customers already today. The first is modernizing from IaaS to database services.

Over the last five or ten years, a lot of our customers have deployed Oracle Database on native IaaS. Now, that was the right choice at the time because it was the only offering and customers rely on Oracle Database. However, now we're seeing an opportunity to leverage Oracle Database@AWS native services to improve scalability, security, maintenance and operations, and reduces costs.

I'll talk about some examples in a little bit. The second category, and there are really two in this category, is reuniting apps and databases in the cloud. Many of my customers have massive Oracle environments sitting on-premises, yet they have chosen AWS as their hyperscaler of choice and made the decision to separate the app stack from the database and leave it on-premises. What that's introduced is latency challenges and customers not having a good experience, and so we're seeing a lot of our customers now capitalizing on their hyperscaler of choice, in this case AWS, and marrying the database in the cloud with the application to improve performance for the end user experience.

At the same time, I have loads of customers running very large Oracle workloads on-premises today. Claims and policy administration systems, custom applications, large data warehouses that rely on high availability, security, and performance, and in many cases are running incredible technology that is Exadata and our Real Application Clusters to maintain the high availability needed. We're unlocking that ability for our customers to migrate those applications and workloads directly into a Database at AWS native service. It's tremendous. I can tell you I've had customers, very large payers across the US, that have been asking for this capability for years, and here we are in 2025 having delivered it.

The fourth is really building applications with Oracle in the hyperscaler dev stack. With the Oracle Database, our converged AI database with native capabilities across vector, JSON, and graph in a single database environment, we can now deploy that natively within AWS directly from the AWS console but capitalize on the advanced AWS services for doing things like AI, agentic systems, or whatever you need. Obviously that goes along with enabling enterprise AI. Today we have a habit in the market of moving data to the AI. Oracle has a firm belief in doing the opposite, which is bringing AI to the data. So allowing our customers to deploy natively within AWS and bring the large language models to the data versus moving the data to the models.

This isn't a new service, I guess I could say. Oracle pioneered the concept of multi-cloud starting in 2019 when we announced the Azure Oracle OCI Interconnect. It really was monumental in the market when Larry and Satya got up on stage and talked about it, and it was really to connect clouds to give our customers the best choice. Since then, we've announced Database at services with Azure, with GCP, and most recently with AWS with two regions live, East 1 and West 2, and many more. I think it's up to now 20 more regions planned in the future. So in five short years, Oracle has delivered the power of choice to our customers.

48 Years of Trust Meets Modern Cloud: Benefits of Oracle's Multi-Cloud Approach

I can tell you from my perspective, having been here for quite some time, when I can sit down in front of senior executives at my customers and say, where do you want to deploy the Oracle Database, you tell me, we're providing you the opportunity to deploy it wherever you like. For me, especially in the life sciences and the payer space, the opportunity for us to partner with AWS is just absolutely tremendous. Probably the largest market opportunity I've seen in many, many years. Now, trusted for more than 48 years, Oracle Database is synonymous with enterprise software.

Founded in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories, if you didn't know that, by Larry Ellison, our first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency. So we were founded and born out of the intelligence community with a rich history predicated on security, trust, and scale. Most large enterprises today and entities around the world, both government and otherwise, rely on Oracle Database as the trusted data management service for the majority of the world's data today. Over the last decade, many of our customers, most of our customers, have invested tremendous amounts of dollars in other hyperscalers.

Now, today, with Oracle Database at AWS and Azure and Google, our customers have the choice to deploy that wherever they want to. It's the best of both worlds, and it's truly one of the best things we've released in, I can't tell you. So what about some of the benefits? As I talked about, the Oracle Database has a reputation second to none and only getting better.

Oracle Database delivered at AWS is by far the fastest, most performant, most scalable, and secure way to deliver your Oracle database. Performance and availability are at their peak with maximum performance through purpose-built database infrastructure. Let me be clear, we have deployed our hardware inside of the AWS data centers, which is a unique thing. We minimize latency with local database access directly from the hyperscaler services. It's no different than calling another database service in the AWS console versus calling Oracle's Database at AWS service, either our full Exadata Cloud Service or our Autonomous service, which we'll talk a little bit about later.

You can achieve extreme availability, cut maintenance and downtime, and reduce your operational costs by leveraging native cloud services in AWS from Oracle. We also reduce complexity by using fewer database platforms and requiring less integration. Again, the concept of our converged database being able to handle native vector capabilities, graph, JSON, and spatial within one database environment simplifies management operations. You work directly within the AWS console with no need to punch out to another console. It is directly within the AWS console, and you can create a standardized set of skill sets for the Oracle database. We see our customers that have unlimited license agreements with us capitalize on this tremendously by having the ability to deploy at scale how they need to.

We also reduce risks and enhance security by continuing to identify and remediate threats and reducing the chance of human errors. We deployed the Autonomous Database to be able to self-secure, self-repair, and auto-scale on its own to reduce human intervention, which obviously reduces security risks. And finally, you can use your choice of AI and analytics. Migrate data to the Oracle Database at AWS and securely access your data within the latest Gen AI services and AI capabilities, many new ones which have been announced here at re:Invent today. Run the analytics of your choice and create and run DevOps and microservices how you want.

Why Oracle Database@AWS Delivers the Best of Both Worlds

Now, I'm just going to drill into a little bit of where we are and the top scenarios that we see. To this day, many of my customers are running Oracle databases natively on IaaS services. Now, again, at the time, it was a great choice, but if you could do it over today, would you make the same choice? In 90% of the conversations I have, the answer is no. There's a maintenance overhead, there's database sprawl, and it's costly to maintain. Using the Database at AWS services provides up to 99.995% SLAs, fully managed database infrastructure, and fully managed Autonomous capabilities. We're seeing incredible opportunities for up to 40 to 1 database consolidation given the performant nature of our services deployed within AWS.

The second scenario is reuniting apps and databases in the cloud. I have customers in the healthcare space that have massive data warehouses they have deployed on-premises and want to leverage some of that data to provide customer-facing applications. Performance has never been ideal, but now we have the opportunity to leverage those AWS native services with the Oracle database, removing latency, improving the customer experience, and providing consistent collaborative support, as well as net new development opportunities.

Finally, building new applications with Oracle Database at AWS. Today, a lot of the applications that we see our customers build may not meet performance, availability, or security needs, especially if you're developing applications that require a multitude of databases and data types to support that application. It introduces challenges such as multiple skill set requirements, overhead of additional services for AI and analytics, and different security paradigms for different databases. We offer enterprise-grade performance at scale, high availability, security, and a single database that supports all data types: JSON, vector, graph, spatial, unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data in a single environment. Built-in AI and machine learning capabilities allow us to bring AI to the data versus the opposite.

Again, Oracle Database at AWS offers the best of both worlds with enterprise-grade data management services that are

highly available, fully automated, performant, agile, built-in security. Combined with the most widely adopted cloud today, leveraging services like EC2, EKS, S3, SageMaker, Bedrock, Amazon Q, or any of the native services that have been announced today. So as we wrap up here in the next two or three minutes, it's really why Oracle Database at AWS. And I can tell you, again, in my 15-year career, it is probably the easiest conversation that I can go have with our customers.

I can provide full Oracle capabilities in our purpose-built performance and security on our Exadata X11 hardware deployed inside of the AWS data centers. I can deploy RAC. All of my customers that run RAC over the years have been asking, why can't I deploy RAC and have the high availability I need inside of AWS? Now we can. It's been a while, but we finally delivered it.

Migrate your on-premise workloads easily and quickly. There's another advantage, de-risking projects by migrating workloads directly from Oracle databases on-premises, directly to an Oracle database running in AWS. It's a seamless migration. We're doing these and have many, many customers live in production today already.

Second, low latency. I get this question a lot, so I do have to clarify. It runs within the AWS data center to enable latency-sensitive applications to perform at their best. The same connectivity latency for Oracle Database at AWS and the first-party AWS services in AWS data centers. No difference. A seamless experience.

In order to deliver a service like this, we had to provide a seamless experience for our customers. Provision deployed directly from the AWS Management Console or API, a collaborative support for supporting the customers in need, and purchasing it directly through the AWS Marketplace. Again, a unique opportunity for us to capitalize on commits already made with AWS, burn down the commercials, leveraging Database at Services, and unlocking databases today that are often sitting on-premises. Get them to the cloud.

And then we have native AWS services like Zero ETL integration between Oracle Database Services and AWS analytics services, and a connected enterprise and Oracle database with EC2 and the rest of the services. Now, as I wrap here, we've got one minute left. If you want more information about this, it is certainly a huge opportunity for us. We'd love to talk to you.

One, we've got a booth over in the corner, happy to answer questions. And two, we have a litany of these opportunities coming across the US in Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Austin, Seattle to come talk to our teams about the opportunity and how we can unlock this for you and your other customers. So with that, I really appreciate everyone's time.

I'd be happy to also dive in if anybody has more questions about healthcare specifically, versus just the Database at AWS service. Oracle has a massive commitment to healthcare, as you know. We are committed to help driving the health ecosystem across it. So I'd be happy to talk more specifics about that if you have any questions, but certainly happy to talk about this incredible service and partnership that we have with AWS if there's anything you'd like. With that, thank you very much. Appreciate your time today.

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