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Startups Leap Forward with Modern Cloud
ServicesCopyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | 070921
Running in the cloud offers much more than the standard differentiators of better performance and lower costs.
Modern cloud technologies give builders agility, elasticity,
portability, and autonomous capabilities that drive new innovations
in a scalable and secure environment. From microservices to
serverless architectures to machine learning, these technologies
enable innovation on a scale—and timeline—we’ve never seen
before. We can reimagine what is possible, from smart cities to
medical breakthroughs, global challenges solved and new business
models born.
Although powerful and versatile, cloud-native technologies can be
complex, which can make staying up-to-speed on these services
challenging, even for seasoned IT and development teams. Today,
most cloud providers offer managed services that handle the
complexities of these workloads, making deployment and operations
easy. Managed cloud services, like Oracle Cloud infrastructure, let
development and IT teams take advantage of new and sophisticated
cloud capabilities without having to develop advanced skills.
With an enterprise-grade public cloud, Oracle offers a growing
list of services and utilities for constructing new cloud-native and
modern apps, all on a unified platform and networking fabric. With
an integrated solution strategy based on open standards, Oracle’s
platform is technology-agnostic and provides choice and portability.
With Oracle Cloud infrastructure, a multitude of technology-agnostic
and portable platforms can be used to give developers the ability
to use containers, microservices, API-based and serverless
architectures, and DevOps processes and tools. And Oracle’s AI and
ML capabilities are working behind the scenes, all the time, to keep
systems running optimally.
From container-based services like Kubernetes, to event-driven
architectures like Functions, to next-generation autonomous
databases, startups in Oracle for Startups are finding Oracle’s
modern cloud services a springboard to innovation and new
business growth.
Let’s look at a few of these modern cloud solutions and the
startups building with them.
Having the ability to run different types of software, like Kubernetes, and different types of database software is a big deal for us. It’s very important that cloud providers allow the latest, most widely used tools in their cloud, especially as startups like us deploy on client cloud. Oracle gives us the flexibility to spin up an instance so our enterprise clients can have the functionality they need.”
— Tony NashCEO and Founder
Complete Intelligence
We leveraged Oracle’s Cloud Native services to go from a static application to a dynamic microservices-based application that allows us to on-board customers daily.Oracle Cloud is a simple, low-cost process that allows us to bring growers the best practices in agronomy, helping the growers detect disease and pests, which helps them grow more and provide food security for the world.”
— Simcha ShoreCEO and Founder
AgroScout
Automating the orchestestration of application deployment
Kubernetes is an open-source, container-orchestration system
for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and
management. Container infrastructures are resilient, scalable
and support real-time application development with the ability
to reliably and repeatedly deploy to a range of environments
throughout all stages of a product’s lifecycle. This provides
portability and avoids lock-in.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes
(OKE) is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service
that can deploy containerized applications to the cloud. Unlike
most providers, Oracle offers OKE as a free managed service,
running on higher-performance, lower-cost compute shapes.
DevOps engineers can use unmodified, open source Kubernetes
for application workload portability while simplifying operations
with automatic updates and patching.
One of the key reasons we were excited to move from AWS to OCI was Oracle’s renewed focus on utilizing, and contributing to, open source projects. Our technology stack has always been powered by open source technologies like Kubernetes and Istio. This has allowed us to focus on our core product differentiators, the things that really impact our customers, rather than reinventing the wheel.”
— Jonathan Girven CTO and Cofounder, Sauce (acquired by Oracle in 2020)
OKE in action
AWINI Saudi Arabia-based startup Awini is an Uber-style application that transports goods instead
of people, using trucks. To expand its driver network, customer base, and franchise programs across new
geographies and markets, Awini needed a platform that was easy and fast to deploy but delivered control
and scalability. Awini uses OKE to add new features and enhancements such as route management, driver
safety, and fuel tracking capabilities.
“We wanted to change our solution architecture from VM-based to containers-based
architecture, as the latter provides more control and efficient operations. And Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure (OCI) provides managed Kubernetes services, which gave us the freedom to
design our solution the way we see fit and helps new members on our team to get on board
easily and fast. And Oracle Cloud did not disappoint regarding this point. We found that the
openness of the platform is very important.”
—Dr. Abdulrahman AlsultanCEO and Founder, Awini
COMPLETE INTELLIGENCE Complete Intelligence, a Houston-based startup, maximizes profitability
for a variety of global businesses by streamlining the cost and revenue planning decision process through
actionable AI forecasting. More than 15 billion data points run within the Complete Intelligence platform
daily, making hundreds of millions of calculations, across 1,400 industries. Dealing with massive data sets
while working with large enterprise customers, Complete Intelligence needed the flexibility and portability
provided by cloud-native services like Kubernetes. Oracle’s Kubernetes services have been essential as they
scale their solutions for their growing portfolio of multinational cutomers.
“For us, it has a lot to do with the scale of data and the intensity of computation.
Kubernetes is a specific and essential tool, that’s widely accepted, and we need it to get
our work done. Having access to the most widely used tools, especially as startups like
us deploy on client cloud, gives us the flexibility to spin up an instance so our enterprise
clients can have the functionality they need.”
—Tony NashCEO and Founder, Complete Intelligence
JOULICA Joulica is a real-time analytics solution for continuous customer experience optimization.
The solution harnesses data from all customer interaction channels into a unified, actionable platform. By
complementing existing CRM systems, Joulica offers personalized and consistent experiences, helping
customers adapt their servicing strategies and workflows in real-time. Joulica’s customers include Fortune
50 organizations and operators of some of the largest call centers on the planet. Oracle’s Kubernetes
services has been essential for their scale, allowing easy migration of their CI/CD system while providing
fine-grained control, automation, and security. The ease and consistency of deployments lessened the
learning curve for their developers, reduced time to deliver new features, and lowered costs by enabling
clusters to be efficiently spun up or torn down.
“With the OKE tools and APIs we found it easy to migrate our CI/CD pipeline to OKE and
achieve our goal of fully automating the CI/CD process. With a handful of steps developers
can quickly deploy a single service or a full production environment. Auto-scale and self-
healing capabilities of OKE gives us confidence that our application remains in a healthy
state, which is key to us being able to build resilient mission critical solutions. A selection of
monitoring tools and established serviceability patterns give both us and the customer the
visibility to troubleshoot and optimize production environments.”
—Tony McCormackCEO and Founder, Joulica
YELLOWDOG London-based YellowDog helps film studios render full-length feature films in the cloud,
deploying as many as 198,000 compute cores in about 30 minutes. YellowDog has been running its rendering
platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) since 2017. Animators can build out their scenes and sync each
motion, movement, and texture as they create them. And with YellowDog, there’s no waiting. Artists can
provision a machine and start rendering a workload—sometimes within seconds. Being able to provision
machines quickly is a top priority for YellowDog, and a key reason it runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“It’s really important that the initial run-up
time is absolutely minimal. People want to be
able to burst on a massive scale. They want
to provision 200 or 300 machines instantly.
Pairing Oracle with automated provisioning
tools, such as Terraform and Ansible, makes
it much easier for us to bring up nodes very
quickly and manage these huge jobs across
the entire infrastructure.”
—Simon PonsfordChief Executive and Technology Officer
YellowDog
Provisioning infrastructure without the manual processes
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of manual
processes. IaC provides a single source of truth – your declarative code – which has many advantages that ensure
you’re creating resources consistently without error while reducing time to manage and set up. Benefits include
increased speed in deployments, reduction in errors, improved consistency, and elimination of configuration drift.
Oracle Resource Manager is a fully managed service that lets you provision infrastructure resources on Oracle
Cloud infrastructure using Terraform, HashiCorp’s open-source, industry-standard IaC software tool. You can bring
in your Terraform template definition and easily create and manage your infrastructure resources, or choose from
our many available quick-start and sample solutions, using infrastructure-as-code to automate provisioning across
all OCI resources including Compute, Networking, Load Balancers, Block and Object Storage. Resource Manager
also integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) so you can define granular permissions for Terraform
operations. It currently has support for CLI, SDK and Console.
Oracle Resource Manager in action
“Resource Manager has some fancy features that
enhance your Terraform projects. In addition to
speed, it provides better collaboration across teams,
making work more transparent, consistent, reliable,
and continuously improved upon. Since Resource
Manager is built upon the widely adopted Terraform,
developers can be sure their scripts will work across
cloud providers. This provides portability, which
is key in today’s multicloud world, especially for
startups needing interoperability and agility.”
—Todd SharpDeveloper Advocate, Oracle Cloud
Functions to us is a requirement, our standard in terms of infrastructure. Our solution consists of field IoT sensors monitoring waste bins and tanks integrated to our cloud platform, and that is the way we bring data to our data lake. Considering that sensors are sending information frequently, but not all the time, you don’t pay for idle time of infrastructure, only when it’s used. The other great advantage is you don’t need to take care of infrastructure, the Cloud’s backend takes care of it for us.”
— Frederico Ferreira CacadorBusiness Development Director, Waste2Go
Writing code instead of monitoring infrastructure
Serverless, functions-as-a-service (FaaS) computing allows
developers to focus on writing code, instead of managing and
monitoring infrastructure like servers, clusters, networks, and
storage. Oracle Functions is a fully managed serverless cloud
service based on the open source Fn Project, allowing developers
to create applications that can be easily ported to other cloud
and on-premises environments. Oracle Cloud Functions lets
developers create, run, and scale applications without managing
any infrastructure very quickly and paying only for what they use.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Events is a managed event-routing
platform based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
(CNCF) standards. Events allow cloud users to subscribe to changes
and automatically react to them using a variety of Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure services. Oracle Functions and Events work together
to provide an event-driven serverless platform for cloud native
application development.
Utilizing Oracle Functions can reduce costs significantly while letting users leverage Oracle Cloud’s high performance infrastructure. And since Oracle Functions is based on the Fn Project, users can develop using any language and provide services on Oracle Cloud without any complicated operational tasks.”
— Kosta DjukicCloud Specialist
Oracle for Startups
Bringing autonomy to the database
Let’s be realistic. Large, high-profile companies can survive data
breaches. Startups trying to impress enterprise-level partners are
going to have a more difficult time. A data breach could signal the end
of your credibility and your business.
Oracle Autonomous Database is the world’s first cloud-based
autonomous data management system that automates
database optimization, security, backup, updates, and other
routine administrative tasks traditionally performed by database
administrators. Autonomous databases perform all of these tasks
through machine learning, not human intervention. It’s a next-
generation database that reduces operational costs by up to 90%
with a multimodel converged database and machine learning-
based automation for full lifecycle management. This allows better
operational efficiency, usage of resources, and a highly available
database with improved performance and enterprise-grade security.
Oracle Autonomous Database runs natively on Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure while providing scalability and workload-optimized
cloud services for transaction processing and data warehousing.
• Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW): ADW is primarily used
for business intelligence and analytical processing, typically
dealing with huge amounts of data that require faster, efficient
database scanning. All your reporting, dashboards, and data-
driven applications can use ADW as a primary source of data.
ADW provides elasticity, continuous query optimization, scalability,
superior performance tuning, repairing of the data warehouse,
etc. This database is also used in visualizations, machine learning
analysis, analytical models, and general database capabilities.
• Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP): ATP is built for
time-based transactional data for mission critical applications.
ATP can perform multiple administrative operations to support
applications, and it can be deployed in a few minutes and natively
supports multiple data types, including document, graph, spatial,
JSON, XML, and more.
BOTSUPPLY Copenhagen-based startup BotSupply develops conversational, multilingual AI-based
interfaces for customers in a range of industries. In addition to testing and building its cutting-edge
chatbot platform using Oracle Digital Assistant, it’s now developing an offering on Oracle Autonomous
Data Warehouse (ADW) that further extends its chatbot capabilities into the realm of deep-data analysis.
BotSupply’s chatbot solution collects lots of data that businesses want to tap for additional insights.
Using Autonomous Data Warehouse, the startup’s Insights product gives customers a new way to
derive actionable insights from emails, transcripts, and other data sources to then discover and visualize
trends hidden within that vast collection of data to clearly show user intent. For example, by analyzing
the data collected from emails, phone calls, and chatbots, Insights could reveal that 70% of a company’s
conversations with customers are about delivery status.
“We want customers to dive one level deeper and understand the why behind the conversations,
extracting new insights and making those insights actionable. But we needed a platform that
is highly secure, automated and can analyze massive amounts of data quickly for our large
enterprise customers. The Autonomous Database does that. It takes databases to a new level,
it’s the future.”— Francesco Stasi
CEO and Cofounder, BotSupply
Autonomous Database in action
THIGBE Thigbe was founded on the simple idea that it should be easy to find the best rate and manage
residential and commercial utility bills through a simple process. Thigbe offers full concierge services for
clients, takes the leg work out of finding the best supplier, and helps customers break free from the burden of
managing utility purchasing processes. The company applies data management to industries that everyone
needs but few understand. They’ve also built charitable giving into the company structure, by giving one-third
of what customers pay them to local charities. To manage their complex data streams seamlessly, Thigbe
turned to Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) to run the core infrastructure of their business,
noting ATP’s scalability, connectivity, and security.
“For a startup like us it has been a great relief to not have to worry about managing our own
database server and software. With our system in the cloud, we were able to seamlessly adapt
to the challenges of the pandemic and continue to serve our customers and to grow. With
Oracle’s autonomous services, we have the confidence and capability to move ahead with
data intensive projects for customers, knowing the infrastructure will be there to meet the load
when needed. We’ve saved at least 10 man-hours per month from our developer group, and
I’m probably dramatically under-estimating that time.” — Mike Brasovan
President and Founder, Thigbe
OMNIINDEX Developed with 13 patents and AI throughout, OmniIndex takes unstructured data and
messages and puts them into a format that enables them to be analyzed. Currently, most analytics
software only works on traditional ERP and CRM systems, which only account for 20% of data.
OmniIndex enables analytics on the other 80% and creates a coherent index for business intelligence
analytics, compliance, and cost containment information. To process massive amounts of unstructured
data quickly, efficiently and securely, OmniIndex turned to Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing
(ATP) and Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW), using ATP for indexing of desktops, cloud stores, email, etc.
ADW takes care of the analytics processing.
“Speed is so important for us—deployment and performance. We needed a database that
can handle massive workloads fast and needs little intervention. For the amount of data that
we’re putting on, we have to ensure the analytics aren’t hanging around, and data scientists
aren’t waiting for results. You just spin up an instance and get on with what you do best, which
is your application. It’s incredibly easy to get up and running, taking about three minutes. It’s
super fast. And it’s very, very important to us.”
— Simon BainCEO and Founder, OmniIndex
Bringing flexibility to data science
Effective machine learning models are the foundation of successful
data science projects, but the volume and variety of data facing
businesses can be overwhelming. A comprehensive enterprise-grade
data science platform can greatly increase the productivity of
individual data scientists by automating their entire workflow and
providing strong collaboration tools to help ensure that data science
projects deliver real value to businesses.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science is data source agnostic
and gives data scientists flexible tools to build, manage, deploy, and
monitor machine learning models. Data scientists use machine
learning algorithms to extract knowledge and insights from a
given data set. These insights can be used by applications and
business analytics systems to drive decision-making. Almost every
organization and every function will leverage machine learning in
some format to advance and optimize their business functions.
AGROSCOUT AgroScout is an AI-based agritech
startup focused on the early detection of disease and pest in
field crops by giving farmers drone-enabled AI technology to
spot problems earlier. Machine learning algorithms analyze
collected image data and tell farmers when and where to
spray. By knowing which pests and diseases to treat, growers
can save money, improve yields, and feed more people.
AgroScout migrated to Oracle Cloud from AWS, and their
performance on OCI has increased by orders of magnitude.
The speed of downloading thousands of pictures of crops
from fields and analyzing has been reduced from several
minutes to only a few seconds.
Oracle Data Science Platform in action
We were privileged to be one of the first users of the Data Science Platform and it’s where we’ve been doing all the deep learning. New horizons have opened up with the recent addition of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science that improves our ability to collaboratively build, train and deploy machine learning models. This addition has reduced costs, increased efficiency and has helped us increase our global footprint faster.”
— Simcha ShoreCEO and Founder
AgroScout
Unleashing low-code development
Low-code and no-code development is growing in popularity as
businesses desire to make it easier for business users to develop
apps faster with less coding expertise. Oracle APEX is a managed cloud
service that allows developers and novices to build data-driven enterprise
applications quickly and easily, running against Oracle Autonomous
Database as a serverless service. A low-code development platform,
Oracle APEX is a visual drag-and-drop development environment
intended for business users, not professional programmers, although
it can make experienced programmers more productive. A recent
study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build
enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without
having to learn complex, full-stack technologies.
IDENTV IDenTV provides advanced video analytics
based on AI capabilities powered by computer vision,
automated speech recognition, and textual semantic
classifiers. IDenTV’s suite of more than 30 AI processing
engines—including computer vision, automated speech
recognition, machine translation, and natural language
processing — provide automation, optimization, and big
data analytics for deep understanding and data-driven
decision-making that had been unattainable in the past.
IDenTV believes that Oracle’s Data Science product, in
conjunction with Autonomous Database, gives them a
unique edge to be competitive and unique in the market.
With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, we are able to deliver business value faster than ever before. Our data science teams can now seamlessly access data without worrying about the complexities of data locations or access mechanisms. While using open-source capabilities like TensorFlow, Keras, and Jupyter notebooks embedded within the environment, we can streamline our model training and deployment tasks resulting in tremendous cost savings and faster results.”
— Amro ShihadahCOO and Founder
IDenTV
A variety of modern tools, like Oracle’s APEX, makes Oracle a valuable service provider. I would highly recommend Oracles system because of the service and because of the tools they provide that allow you to very quickly take your ideas from concept to reality. APEX is a game changer!”
— Mike BrasovanPresident and Founder
Thigbe
Oracle APEX allows citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy complete, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort. Offering a wide-range of cloud services, including low-code solutions, it provides businesses of all sizes versatility, flexibility, and scale in building and deploying applications quickly and easily.”
— Kosta DjukicCloud Specialist, Oracle for Startups
Unlocking trust and transparency with blockchain
Although blockchain rose to prominence alongside cryptocurrency,
there are abundant applications beyond Bitcoin. Blockchain is behind
new solutions for sustainability, supply chains, food certification, and
other complex problems that require transparency and immutability.
When what’s required is a secure collaboration network across
multiple entities, blockchain brings everyone together in real time to
ensure business trust.
Oracle Cloud Blockchain platform is a preassembled enterprise-grade
solution for building blockchain networks. It’s built on top of The
Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, and it has all the underlying
infrastructure dependencies, contains lifecycle management, event
services, identity management and REST proxy, and a number of
operations and monitoring tools.
Oracle provides end-to-end visibility of multi-entity networks,
establishing trust between participating partners and reducing
development and deployment time. The Oracle Blockchain Platform
Cloud Service also connects well with Oracle Autonomous Database,
which helps businesses save money and time as they scale their
database needs up or down.
RETRACED Award-winning German startup retraced is
using Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service to optimize
sustainability in fashion supply chains. Their supply chain
management tool helps fashion brands map and verify
their sustainability data includes certifying details about raw
materials, textile manufacturers, fabric dyers, designers,
craftspeople, factories, and seamsters. A QR code is built
automatically as the information is gathered. Scanning the
code, brands receive supply chain data they can analyze,
while consumers can check for ethical sourcing and
sustainability. The platform’s dynamic scalability is critical
because of the seasonality of the apparel market.
Oracle Blockchain In action
The dynamic scaling is extremely important for us, because we can allow running full throttle massive engines when we need them but cut costs when they are not required. There are just so many products in the market that aren’t ready to use, and Oracle’s was. It was comparably easy to set up and work with because of all the pre-installments.”
— Peter MerkertCofounder
retraced
Email: [email protected]: @OracleStartupFacebook: @OracleStartupsBlog: blogs.oracle.com/startup
Is your startup ready to leverage modern cloud technologies to scale your solution in new and exciting ways? Join Oracle for Startups and start building with free cloud credits, 70% discount for two years, and loads of business-building resources from customer introductions to mentorship to marketing support.
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CIRCULOR Circulor’s mission is traceability of materials
in industrial supply chains including the automotive
industry. Oracle for Startups helped introduce Circulor
to a major automotive customer, who is now using the
platform to track supply chains of critical minerals used in
electric cars. The Circulor platform tags, tracks, and traces
conflict minerals from the local mine to the manufacturers.
Oracle’s pre-assembled blockchain enabled Circulor to
focus on their specialty—minerals tracking—without
spending time and effort building hardened blockchain
infrastructure. The startup found it substantially sped up
time to market while providing confidence to end-users.
We can transparently record and share the source of all raw materials using distributed ledger, which prevents unethically sourced minerals from passing through the supply chain. This will also cut costs for miners who currently shoulder this compliance cost in our industry. If you are trying to sell an enterprise-class solution, you need to be able to demonstrate that it is secure and scalable. Having a partner like Oracle means I don’t have to spend too much time explaining that it is secure and scalable.”
— Douglas Johnson-PoensgenCEO, Circulor
Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | 070921