Oracle launches startup accelerators across Europe
Oracle’s first startup accelerator was launched last year in Bangalore in India and the next ones will be based in Bristol, UK, Paris, France and Tel Aviv in Israel. Three others will be launched in Delhi and Mumbai in India, and Sao Paulo in Brazil. The Tel Aviv scheme was launched last week, Bristol today and Paris next week.
The programme will take five cloud startups to work with its research and development team and provide access to 420,000 enterprise customers around the world every six months. Oracle will not take equity in the startups but will provide free access to its cloud services, co-working space and will connect the new companies with investors. The intakes will start in the summer, with a focus on business-to-business technology.
“We are being deliberately vague [on what ewe are looking for],” said Reggie Bradford, senior vice president of product development at Oracle and a serial entrepreneur who is running the global programme from London (above at the launch in Bristol). “We are not looking to specifically target AI or IoT, we want to open up the funnel and invite as many entrepreneurs as possible,” he said.
Other schemes in European cities such as Berlin are set to follow, says Bradford. The aim is to give Oracle and its customers access to new technologies from startups that will run on its ‘bare metal’ cloud.
“The timing wasn’t right for us [to do this] two year or ten years ago,” said Bradford. “We are less concerned about being a ‘me too’ incubator provider but we are doing things to add the most value to the things that are already here. It’s a multimillion dollar commitment globally – there’s a sustainable commitment from the company to foster and develop startups.”
The bare metal cloud was launched in October last year with three data centres (which Oracle calls domains) in Phoenix, with three more opening in Virginia this week and three in London later in the spring.
The Oracle cloud allows operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Solaris to run on the 32 cores on Intel’s Xeon processors, rather than virtual cores on hypervisor software. Oracle has also moved the software defined network technology into the switches to avoid the need for a hypervisor and this provides a latency of under 1ms between the data centres. While the initial focus is on dedicated resources to allow enterprise customers to ovetheir private networks onto the bare metal cloud, Oracle is also planning to offer 4, 8 and 16 virtualised cores in future to compete more directly with the public cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft.
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