Oracle, the competitor of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the field of cloud computing, intends to become the instigator of innovation in the market. The firm led by Larry Ellison announced Monday, Jan. 16 the opening of an accelerator dedicated to startups specializing in cloud computing technologies.

Based in Israel, this program takes over the pilot originally set up in Bangalore, India. This acceleration center is the first of a long list according to information collected by Reuters.


An accelerator among many others

Oracle's Oracle accelerator will offer 6 months of mentoring for startups offering applications in the cloud. The US research and development team will manage the program by providing access to Oracle's client portfolio, investors, partners and technologies for the selected start-ups. The accelerator also provides guidance from forecasters in the group.

with his competitor declaring reaching $ 10 billion in sales by the end of the year. Ellisson responded in December that his company had every chance to defeat Salesforce in this game, even if it was "not easy."

In the same vein, Oracle took advantage of the CloudWorld conference in New York on Jan. 17 to announce the opening of three new cloud regions to compete with AWS and Azure. The data centers will be based in Reston, Virginia, London, and Turkey by mid-2017.

To catch Amazon, Oracle doubles the price of its licenses on AWS

Until now, each AWS virtual processor was billed for a half-core. The deal has changed, Oracle's new cloud licensing policy now specifies that an AWS vCPU will be considered a complete core if hyper-threading is not enabled . Hyper-threading involves creating two logical processes on a single chip. The user of an AWS vCPU will need to acquire two licenses to run his system .

This price increase aims to make Oracle's cloud more attractive compared to its competitors. This is not surprising when you consider that the company has named AWS as its main competitor. By acquiring NetSuite for $ 9 billion, Oracle was aiming to become a leader in the cloud .

A strategy focused on competition

The company had indeed ensured that its cloud would be cheaper and faster than AWS. These new conditions of use rebalance the market by favoring Oracle over AWS, in the eyes of companies interested in cloud services . Until now, Oracle's LaaS offering has been far behind leaders such as AWS , Microsoft and Google .

By September 2016, the company was already planning to block AWS by making many comparisons between its technology and AWS. For example, the company demonstrated that its Oracle DB application was 24 times faster on its cloud than on AWS. This implies that what is achievable in 24 hours under AWS will be achieved in less than one hour on the Oral Cloud.

Oracle has not yet made a statement about the fate of its customers who have an Oracle database deployed on AWS. This new policy puts Azure and AWS on the same level because Azure no longer uses hyper-threading of Intel processors .

With these radical changes, the cloud solutions provider intends to widen the gap with its competitors, even if it makes some of its customers dissatisfied.