Oracle supercharged its efforts to take on cloud giants Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and today launched a data science platform that runs as a native service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The announcement marks the company's second cloud push of the new year. Last week Oracle announced its Generation 2 Cloud was available in five new regions including Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Melbourne, Australia; Osaka, Japan; Montreal; and Amsterdam.

The new Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure Data Science Platform uses elements of DataScience.com, which the software giant acquired in 2018, and centralizes data science tools, projects, and infrastructure in a fully governed workspace. It also integrates with additional machine learning and existing Oracle data tools: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalog, Oracle Big Data Service, Oracle Cloud SQL, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Flow, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Machines for Data Science.

The vendor claims the new offering can bring data scientists together and aid analysis with capabilities like shared projects, model catalogs, team security policies, reproducibility, and auditability.

Intelligence from data is changing the status quo of offerings in the industry as data volumes continue to explode, driving interest in operationalizing machine learning (ML), automated machine learning tools, and breaking down silos between data scientists.

A recent Forrester report predicts “insight-driven businesses” — companies that use software to create a competitive advantage and help them make use of all of this data — will by 2020 steal $1.2 trillion annually from their less-informed peers.

The new data science platform marks a continued effort by Oracle to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and ML into its cloud infrastructure. In October of 2017, it unveiled its AI Platform Cloud Service and AI-powered applications. And the following month, it added high-performance computing, big data, and AI to its enterprise public cloud in an effort to keep up with the evolving and increasingly competitive marketplace.

“Clearly, they’ve been beefing up their infrastructure play,” said Gartner analyst Sid Nag in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “But engineering doesn’t win the day. You can have great engineering infrastructure, but how are you going to attract customers? The key piece that will drive the market share catchup game would be getting more net new clients.”