Oracle has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) customer excellence center in Sydney to help customers across Australia and Oceania adopt the technology, the company announced at the Oracle AI World Tour Sydney event this week.
The Sydney facility is the second in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region and joins the Singapore center, which has been in operation for more than six months, said Steven Bovis, Oracle’s regional managing director for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).
These centers reflect Oracle’s transition from a product-centric organization to one with a comprehensive team that understands customers’ business and technology challenges and can provide ideas to address those challenges, he said. As such, these centers are part of Oracle’s global customer success organization.
For example, the Singapore Center helped car-sharing service GetGo build a system that compares photos taken when a car is picked up and returned. Automatically detect damage, generate estimated repair costs, and prompt customers to authorize card transactions. The system went into production within three months.
Although the new center is physically located in Sydney, it can be accessed virtually from other parts of Oceania, Bovis noted. He added that this effort is not just about Oracle; the company’s partners can also be involved in customer projects.
“AI is driving unprecedented global demand for cloud infrastructure, data platforms and storage. According to Adapt’s latest Edge research, Australian organizations are already experiencing a 23% surge in computing demand, with a further 26% growth expected next year as AI moves from pilots to production,” said Matt Boon, Senior Research Director at Adapt.
“As spending increases, boards and executives are looking for clear evidence of the financial impact of AI,” Boone added. “Technology leaders are under pressure to demonstrate tangible benefits as funding constraints and competing priorities remain major barriers. Centers like the Center of Excellence launched by Oracle in Sydney can help accelerate the transition from AI experimentation to real business value, while strengthening Australia’s innovation capabilities.”
In other news, Oracle AI Database service is now officially available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in addition to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Bovis said some local customers are already using AWS-based services.
Oracle AI World Tour Sydney also featured the work of the company’s local customers, including Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and Aspen Medical.
Victor Chan Heart Institute
The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute’s AI-powered HeartSight app is designed to support the assessment of aortic valve stenosis, one of the most common and serious forms of valvular heart disease and a key focus of the Institute’s research.
While AI has been successfully applied to static medical image analysis tasks (such as identifying breast cancer from mammograms), echocardiograms (ultrasound cardiac imaging) involve video. As a result, the institute’s Valve Disease and AI Lab has had to develop new techniques, but it still relies on human labeling and interpretation of scans to train the models.
By building [HeartSight] Leveraging Oracle AI Database 26ai and OCI Data Science applications, Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is taking an exciting first step in transforming clinical operations from labor-intensive manual analysis to AI-enhanced insights.
Stephen Bovis, Oracle
“Research is at the core of our business,” said Associate Professor Mayoran Namasivayam, Director of the Valvular Heart Disease and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He explained that HeartSight automates processes that previously required significant human time and expertise.
“There is software that can reproduce what we do more quickly and efficiently with less effort,” he said.
This process examines echocardiogram components, such as the interaction between blood flow through the valve and valve movement, to determine the extent of valve restriction and classify it according to severity.
The important point is that HeartSight operates with much less data than was previously required. This application allows diagnostics to be performed in a single scan instead of requiring 80 to 120 scans, and can be performed by non-experts using hand-held equipment if necessary. This not only increases efficiency but also makes diagnostics available to more people, especially in rural and remote areas.
Not only does this help patients, but clinicians also benefit from improved workflows, increasing efficiency for the broader healthcare system. Early and rapid diagnosis means more timely treatment, leading to fewer hospitalizations. A further economic benefit is fewer working days for patients, which means increased national productivity.
“AI has revolutionized our field,” says Namasivayam.
HeartSight is built using Oracle’s Apex low-code application development platform and is powered by Oracle AI Database 26ai. Data is securely stored in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Storage and processed using OCI Data Science.
“Our partnership with Oracle has been very beneficial, fundamental, and very warm,” he said.
The algorithms were developed in-house, and Oracle assisted with the user interface (which was especially important to support plans to make HeartSite available internationally) and provided a secure, compliant, and scalable platform.
“We were able to put [our technology] In a format that can be distributed to point-of-scan systems, handheld devices, reading software, cloud-based analytics… and perform real-time analytics to transform patient care,” Namasivayam explained.
HeartSight has been successfully piloted and externally validated. This was “very exciting and reassuring for our team,” he added. The next step will be a trial with patients from different ethnic backgrounds in non-metropolitan areas to confirm scalability.
The scalability that OCI provides means that this technology can be made available to the world from the Valvular Heart Disease and Artificial Intelligence Institute. “Don’t just solve problems for yourself, solve problems for everyone,” he said.
Looking further ahead creates opportunities to provide better, more efficient, and more accessible care.
The lab is also working on developing artificial heart valves that can last a lifetime, rather than the current 10 to 15 years. The project applies some of the Oracle technology used by the Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 team, Namasivayam said.
“By building [HeartSight] “By leveraging Oracle AI Database 26ai and applications from OCI Data Science, Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is taking an exciting first step in transforming clinical operations from labor-intensive manual analysis to AI-enhanced insights,” said Bovis.
“We look forward to supporting the Institute through the upcoming rigorous validation stages to provide more accurate diagnoses and enable clinicians to focus on complex decision-making and deliver quality patient care.”
aspen medical
Sanja Marais, Aspen Medical’s chief technology and security officer, was unable to attend the event in person, but spoke to Computer Weekly via video call.
Based in Australia, the company provides clinical services in various parts of the world, including managing Lautoka Hospital in Fiji, providing medical services to a multinational security assistance mission in Haiti, and providing rural support programs for the Australian Government.
“For us, Oracle is a complete ecosystem,” she said. Aspen Medical uses a variety of Oracle Fusion Cloud applications (such as human resources and finance) and has also made “significant investments in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Integration Cloud.”
I’m very cautious about not jumping on the hype cycle and trying to AI everything that already has very solid automated processes in place.
Sanja Marais, Aspen Medical
“But a lot of what we do is in and around the Apex low-code app builder, the Autonomous AI Lakehouse for all data and integrations, and Integration Cloud as middleware,” Marais explained.
Apex allows Aspen Medical to rapidly build medical applications that support service delivery. In situations where the company chose to deploy first responders, “we were able to launch a live, resilient, cloud-secure, and portable app on Apex within a week” without going through a procurement process that would have taken months.
Another example is a pharmaceutical inventory management system developed with Apex that can save businesses thousands of dollars annually. It is used wherever Aspen clinicians work and integrates with other parts of the Oracle environment to create sales and purchase orders.
This is especially important in the current geopolitical environment, where inventory management is a major issue, she noted.
Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse enables Aspen Medical to centralize data management, increasing operational efficiency and significantly reducing IT overhead and infrastructure costs.
In addition to helping consolidate and standardize datasets, it provides “data fairness” to users, allowing them to generate reports using natural language instead of writing SQL statements. This allows individuals to ask questions such as “Were there any outliers in the quarterly report?” Because all data from Fusion applications is available in the lakehouse.
“We are implementing it now, which means our operations team will be using natural language and AI-powered data capabilities to create reports,” Marais said, suggesting that improving operations staff activity will ultimately improve patient outcomes. “Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse provides a secure, central platform at the heart of our operations.”
Other areas where AI is being used at Aspen Medical include data interpretation, bid documentation, clinical governance, and the company’s health and wellness program.
“We’re very conservative when it comes to the AI we deliver directly to patients. We’re embedding it in our business processes and data lakes, and we’re trying to slowly get users used to talking to it and prompting it,” Marais said. However, the company is considering leveraging AI in telemedicine in accordance with regulations and guidelines applicable to the healthcare sector.
While AI is being employed to enhance user interfaces and in some cases to aid in integration in the absence of suitable application programming interfaces (APIs), Male City does not believe that AI is a panacea. Aspen Medical continues to leverage robotic process automation (RPA). While AI is better suited for extracting fields from unstructured data such as medical referrals in PDF format, RPA is better suited for moving that data into another system.
Marais added: “I’m very cautious about not jumping on the hype cycle and trying to AI everything that already has very solid automated processes in place.” She noted that while AI will be implemented in decision support products, some aspects of such systems will need to remain algorithmic.
“RPA has been around for a long time, and we use it a lot. We use it between systems, move things around, and use it in place of robust APIs. RPA is a workhorse. It doesn’t think for itself or hallucinate…it just does what it needs to do. So I think AI that interprets unstructured data, combined with solid automated processes, is more useful than a full AI solution.”
Other plans include adding more datasets to Lakehouse and extending self-service capabilities across the organization with better control over access rights. Marais’ team is also using Apex to develop dashboards that combine clinical and financial data to help clients monitor the delivery of contracted services.
Oracle’s Bovis added: “Managing vast amounts of clinical and operational data across a complex global healthcare environment is a major challenge for healthcare providers.
“With the high performance, scalability, reliability, and automation of Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse, Aspen Medical is turning data into real-time insights, increasing operational efficiency, and enabling smarter decision-making. This data-driven transformation demonstrates how healthcare organizations can leverage the latest technology to improve patient outcomes while building more sustainable and responsive systems.”
