Oracle is unveiling a program that it says will help vendors more easily sell technology, including artificial intelligence, to the Department of Defense.
The program, called the Oracle Defense Ecosystem, is structured to help smaller companies break through the challenges they typically face in selling tech to the Defense Department, said Rand Waldron, Oracle’s vice president of sovereign cloud.
“It is far too hard to serve the American defense enterprise,” Waldron said. “We can provide an easy path for these companies to better get access to the defense market.”
Oracle said vendors participating in its program will have access to Oracle’s office spaces and be able to tap its expertise on navigating the Pentagon’s procurement processes. Participants also will receive a discount to data-mining company Palantir Technologies’ cloud and AI platform, as well as Oracle’s NetSuite business software.
Selling to the Defense Department has long been tricky for smaller businesses that lack the structural advantages major defense contractors have. That hurts not only smaller tech companies but also the Pentagon, which faces challenges in accessing and integrating cutting-edge technologies, Waldron said.
“We are going to deter and win the next conflict based on how good our technology is,” he said.
To start, the program will count under a dozen companies as members, including AI firms Blackshark.ai and SensusQ, analytics company Metron, and quantum-security firm Arqit. Member companies won’t pay for access to the program because the tech giant is providing the financial backing, Oracle said.
The Austin-based company’s latest move comes when it is ramping up its visibility inside the White House. In January, co-founder Larry Ellison joined President Trump in a White House ceremony announcing Stargate, a set of data centers that Oracle alongside global tech investor SoftBank Group is building for generative AI provider OpenAI. The company was also a corporate sponsor of the 250th Army Birthday Parade and Festival on the National Mall.
Alongside Palantir and defense-technology company Anduril Industries, Oracle has emerged among a wave of tech firms that have aimed to grow their federal defense business. Other tech giants, including Meta Platforms and OpenAI, have recently volunteered their executives to join a new Army innovation corps that will advise on AI and commercial tech acquisition.
In 2022, the company was part of a collection of cloud providers, including Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft, that were awarded a major cloud services contract with the Pentagon.
Despite the uncertainty in government contracting wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency, the organization most closely associated with Elon Musk and cutting government spending, Waldron said he expects Oracle’s Defense Ecosystem to fare well under DOGE’s efficiency mandate.
Eliminating large, status quo contracts, which DOGE has said it would target, opens up more federal dollars for technology innovation from the likes of Oracle’s Defense Ecosystem members, Waldron said. The company is also in direct communication with DOGE, he added.
A key, underlying goal of Oracle’s Defense Ecosystem is to entrench the company’s cloud-computing platform into the Defense Department, and encourage smaller tech startups to build on its cloud platform.
“In many cases, these companies are or will become customers of Oracle,” Waldron said. “They will make a sale to the government, and then they will run the system that they have sold to the government on the Oracle Cloud.”
Now over a decade into its cloud-computing shift, Oracle is still fighting for market share against its rivals, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which dominate the cloud market. But there are signs that with the growth of AI, Oracle is gaining some ground.
The tech company last week reported that quarterly revenue grew 11% to $15.9 billion, exceeding analyst expectations. Oracle is forecasting that its total cloud growth rate will rise 40% this year, compared with 24% in the year prior.
