Oracle cancelled a big announcement at the last minute — here are some clues as to what it could be cooking up

Mark Hurd

Oracle was all set to announce some big news related to customer support this week but, at the last minute, it cancelled.
We've found a few clues as to what that news might be.
Oracle still released a whole bunch of new products this week for its sales, marketing, and support clouds.
But Oracle likely has something even bigger cooking.

Oracle was all set to make a big announcement related to customer support on Wednesday but cancelled at the last minute.

We understand the news pertained to a new cloud service involving customer support, an announcement important enough that it was to be done by one of Oracle's two CEOs, Mark Hurd, complete with a press conference.

Of course, Oracle already offers a "Service Cloud" product, which helps companies manage their customer service requests and processes, so whatever this new product is, it would be something different.

When asked which announcement was tabled, one person in the know said they thought the big news was Oracle's new Infinity product, Oracle's first web analytics cloud service, which is similar to Google Analytics. But the Infinity product did launch this week as planned (it was a product that came from an acquisition Oracle did a year ago). This was one of the many new marketing cloud products launched this week during Oracle's marketing tech conference, Modern Customer Experience 2018, held in Chicago.

It's possible that Oracle merely canceled some planned hoopla around Infinity's launch because at the very same time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being grilled by Congress about how companies are tracking what people do online. So that wasn't a great time to promote a new product that analyzes what people do online.

During the week, Oracle also announced a slew of other new cloud services including a bunch of artificial intelligence features added to its Customer Experience cloud service, geared to helping marketers more easily manage their marketing campaigns.

But we understand that the big news was to be about something else, not about the new AI features in its Customer Experience cloud.

According to one source we talked to, Oracle is in the process of an acquisition that was supposed to be announced but hasn't been. We have not been able to confirm the company Oracle may be buying.

So, this all means that Oracle appears to still be working on a big, new announcement, probably a new product.

The best clue we have is what Larry Ellison said in March during the quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts. He said Oracle is getting ready to launch more big, new services that uses AI to work "autonomously." In March, Oracle announced its new "Oracle Autonomous Database." That's a form of the company's world-famous database that is supposed to manage itself, automatically applying security patches and tuning itself for performance needs.

"There are more autonomous cloud services to come. Over the next few months, we expect to deliver autonomous analytics, autonomous mobility, autonomous application development and autonomous integration services," Ellison promised.

Whatever the mysterious news is, we're told that Oracle does still plan to share it at a later date.

Are you an Oracle insider with a tip on what the company is working on? Please let us know. jbort@businessinsider.com or @Julie188.

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