ByteDance has said publicly that they won't be selling their algorithm (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-13/bytedance...) -- so there's no IP angle here. What is Oracle really getting out of the deal?
It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and die (and they're right).
Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation, buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc). They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).
In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.
The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure. They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.
Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.
Does the ceo/founder have family in china that can be held hostage?
https://www.rd.com/article/the-dangers-of-tiktok-that-are-wo...
This is the real risk.