Oracle and CERN Celebrate 25 Years of Partnership and Innovation

Oracle has been collaborating with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) for the past 25 years. A celebratory event held in February looked back at the past successes arising from the partnership, and looked forward to new challenges that can be addressed through continued successful co-operation between academia, industry, governments and the scientific community.

For 25 years of its 30-year history, Oracle has been providing technological support, expertise and advice to CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory and the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

In that time, Oracle has furnished CERN with solutions to its massive processing power and database needs and CERN has provided Oracle with a challenging environment in which to innovate and push its technologies to the limit. The main event to celebrate this continuing partnership, "From R&D to Innovation: Future Business Opportunities", was held on 6th February 2008 inside the CERN Globe of Innovation.

Inspired by the benefits and breakthroughs that long-term collaboration has generated for both Oracle and CERN, the event brought together around 50 senior leaders from public policy, academia, research, and industry to discuss how open collaboration between all these sectors can accelerate innovation and shape the technologies, markets and societies of the future.

Introducing the event, CERN's Chief Information Officer, Wolfgang von Rueden, outlined the importance that collaboration with industry, and with Oracle in particular, has had for CERN:

“In summer 2008,” he said, “CERN’s Large Hadron Collider [the world’s largest particle accelerator and collider, expected to help us better understand the origins of the universe] will go into operation. Oracle's expertise in data management technologies and its track record of innovation in computing have been invaluable to CERN and its collaborating institutes around the world. Oracle’s solutions help to support the deployment and operation of the immense processing power, scalability, and system reliability needed to collect, distribute, and analyze the huge volumes of data that will be produced by LHC experiments.”

The benefits run both ways: when Oracle developed its Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Streams and Grid Computing technologies, capable of running a single database across distributed computers to harness their collective processing power, CERN represented the ideal user environment in which to test the boundaries of the software and drive further developments. The success of the partnership demonstrates how collaboration between industry and the R&D community can create a positive feedback loop in which each participant enables and enriches the work of the other.

Following the CERN presentation, Oracle EMEA Executive Vice President Sergio Giacoletto expanded on Oracle's vision of collaborative, open R&D and innovation. "R&D is undertaken today more and more in partnerships between academia, industry and governments,” he said. “A collaborative approach is crucial to successful innovation to encourage the intersection of ideas in a multidisciplinary environment.”

Collaboration between industry, academia, governments, and R&D is at the heart of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), which supports the EU's goal of raising European productivity and employment levels beyond those of the US by 2010. As a long-term and trusted strategic advisor to innovative organizations such as CERN, and with a strong local presence within every European Union member state, Oracle is currently participating in a number of key research and development consortia running strategic projects within FP7.

In the last presentation of the morning, the importance of interaction and collaboration for innovation was further stressed by the European Commission's Acting Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, Mario Campolargo. He gave attendees an overview of the Commission's efforts to fund and foster R&D and innovation, and outlined how the Commission envisages the future of ICT over the next 10 or more years.

Following the morning talks, an afternoon roundtable on the major challenges in facilitating and accelerating R&D and innovation provided the main focus of the day. This opportunity to debate and share ideas with peers from different disciplines and sectors of the European economy was met with appreciation by delegates such as Bruno Cassiman, professor of Economics and Strategy in the Strategic Management Department of IESE Business School.

“Today's event was a very clear demonstration of how links to science can be beneficial for business if only organizations keep a sufficiently open mind about these interactions,” Cassiman said. “We need more discussion on the links to science that firms can and should maintain and their impact on the firm’s performance. Such interaction between science and industry holds a lot of promise for the future of innovation.”

The afternoon discussion also highlighted the importance of cross-organizational mobility as well as a focus on people as useful ways of achieving cross-fertilization of ideas in the kind of multicultural and multidisciplinary environments that often give rise to disruptive ideas and therefore to innovation.

Related Links

Sergio Giacoletto’s blog entry about CERN

Oracle Technology Supports CERN's New Particle Accelerator Experiments (Oct 2007)

CERN turns to Oracle Application Express to update internal applications (Jul 2007)