At Oracle OpenWorld, Letty Ledbetter set up several interesting breakout sessions for a handful of us analysts. One of the more enjoyable ones was when Reggie Bradford, SVP described their Cloud Accelerator program.
Located in Bangalore and Delhi in India, Bristol in the UK, Paris in France, São Paulo in Brazil , Singapore and Tel Aviv in Israel, the selected startups benefit from:
• Access to the Oracle IaaS and PaaS and the R&D team
• Engagement opportunities with Oracle’s 400,000÷ customers
Unlike other incubators or accelerators, Oracle does not take equity. Reggie had with him two of the entrepreneurs in the first batch, and I had a chance to follow up with both.
Paul Archer is Founder & Managing Director of Duel. Based in the UK, Duel is focused on enhancing brands. Using machine learning and vision tagging, Duel engages customers post-purchase and rewards them for creating visual testimonials. The service helps turn customers into brand ambassadors, content creators and advocates — and manages, amplifies and moderates it for brands at enterprise scale.
Here are some of his comments
- One of the most memorable points of that trip was a visit to Larry Ellison’s Pacific Heights residence with some of the other accelerator startup executives. He spent a couple of hours with us and really seemed to enjoy being around us young entrepreneurs. There were plenty of stories about the good old days when they started Oracle. We covered a lot of ground from his deep interest in biosciences to scaling your talent as your company grows. Definitely a highlight of my week at OOW.
- At our small size today, we likely would not have looked at Oracle as a development platform. However, I think now that is clear that that's not the case - we will be using their technology and we'll be adding service that we need, and at our level too... and at our price points too, which is really exciting.
- We have been working with Oracle’s industry/innovation advisors who are working with major clients like an external consultant would. So, we're very nicely positioned to work with those guys to get in at the right level.
- There's corporate bureaucracy at any company and certainly at one the size and scale of Oracle. But we have seen the accelerator bulldoze through the barriers
- We have barely been on the market for a couple of months with our e-commerce proposition. Even so, we're able to command a decent amount of VC meetings because they know that we've got the backing of Oracle, and if they ever want to do their due diligence we can pass them on to some of the senior guys in the team in Oracle
In a follow up note, I will cover my conversation with Asaf Eldad of 3DSignals from Israel.
