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Oracle Helps Turn Innovation Into Commercial Reality for Emerging UK Businesses
Oracle has always been committed to innovation and to encouraging and fostering innovation in other companies. The
Oracle Emerging Business Program
is a new UK initiative that aims to nurture innovative IT companies and help them to find markets, customers, and investors for their innovations. The early results are impressive.
Just over thirty years ago, Oracle introduced the world's first commercial database software. Now Oracle stands as the world's largest enterprise software company. Throughout, the key to the company's success has been innovation. Seeking to pass on its expertise at turning innovation into commercial success, Oracle UK has launched the Oracle Emerging Business Program.
The Emerging Business Program comprises multiple discrete initiatives that are designed to make new and entrepreneurial things happen both within and outside Oracle's UK business. One important element is the
Emerging Business Partner Program (EBPP), which seeks to recruit emerging technology companies with innovative solutions for critical challenges around information-sharing and real-time decision-making. Such companies need a robust and scalable supporting IT infrastructure, and Oracle is ideally placed to provide this and to help the emerging companies gain access to potential new markets.
The aim of the EBPP is to take promising young companies
'from Idea to Revenue'. Companies graduating from the EBPP can then join a second Oracle Emerging Business initiative called the
'Ventures Program', which is designed to help them successfully navigate the next stage:
'from Revenue to Growth'.
The Emerging Business program resulted from Oracle's strong belief that established businesses should play a role in nurturing new technology start-ups and entrepreneurs. Innovative products and services are not just good for the UK economy; they're also of great interest to existing Oracle customers. Through its Emerging Business Partner Program, Oracle can introduce exciting new technologies to its UK customer base, and, in doing so, help Program members to grow and extend their own business.
Once a company has been accepted into the EBPP, a dedicated Oracle team works closely with it, providing expert business advice, technical expertise and access to potential investors, business partners and other useful industry contacts. Oracle's input helps Program members to develop their products, to enhance their business propositions and ultimately to attract investors and customers.
The benefits of the EBPP are widespread. "Some of these start-ups may be able to crack problems such as reducing carbon footprint," said Oracle UK Managing Director, Ian Smith, in an interview with UK trade magazine Computer Weekly, "which could reduce our research and development time by three to nine months."
Zogix is a good example of an EBPP member that is exploring ways to use new software technologies to reduce the corporate carbon footprint. One of the Program's biggest success stories to date, Zogix won the 7th Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Innovation Award for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The award was made in recognition of its Employee Services Platform, a procurement system that employs Web 2.0 concepts and technologies to help companies lower costs and reduce carbon emissions. It works by incentivizing employees to reduce the carbon footprint of the products and services (e.g. business travel) they purchase on expenses, and by encouraging them to influence colleagues to do the same using the Zogix platform's social networking infrastructure.
The Innovation Award win, together with business connections made through Oracle's PartnerNetwork, have since led to Zogix being offered £1.2million in seed funding.
Other innovative firms that have signed up to the EBPP include EMEA OPN Innovation Award winners
Trampoline Systems, whose SONAR platform analyses and maps social networks, expertise, and information flow within organizations;
Can Factory, a small technical consultancy specializing in high peak-traffic/high-capacity websites; and
Toumaz Technology, developer of a smart, low-power sensor for use with healthcare monitoring systems.
To identify further opportunities to support innovative emerging companies in the UK, the Emerging Business team has also been working with government-backed and non-governmental organizations. In December 2007 it was asked by the UK Trade & Investment organization (
www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk ) to help coordinate the international marketing of the UK's ICT sector. At the same time, Oracle UK is in the process of introducing two new Emerging Business initiatives of its own. The Open Alchemy initiative seeks to foster 'collaborative invention' across different industry sectors, while the IP/Tech Transfer Program will see Oracle and selected partners working with leading university research departments to commercialize ideas currently in development in the academic world.
Click
here to access Oracle's Emerging Business webpage
Click
here to download Oracle's Emerging Business Partner Programme brochure
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