Oracle Opens The Doors To Massive Austin Campus Entirely Focused On Driving Cloud Solutions

Oracle pulled the curtain back from its newest campus on Thursday – an expansive innovation center in Austin, Texas, entirely focused on promoting the software giant's cloud solutions and cultivating a workforce without attachments to its legacy on-premises business.

A month after announcing a massive data center buildout to expand the presence of its cloud infrastructure, Oracle shared the vision for a capital project that aims at attracting talent, especially in the sales space, and creating an environment to showcase Oracle's cloud technology for customers and partners. Employees started moving in at the start of the year, an Oracle spokesperson told CRN.

The tech giant headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif. (pictured), has invested somewhere around a billion dollars on building out the lakefront campus, which creates an environment designed to appeal to the professional preferences of a new generation of Oracle employees, said Edward Roske, CEO of interRel, an Oracle partner in Arlington, Texas.

"This is really a pivot from people who understand on-prem to those who understand cloud. No one in this building will have any holdover legacy background," Roske said.

[Related: Oracle: Q3 Results Don't Adequately Reflect Potential For Cloud Growth]

Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd, in a prepared statement, said the facility is intended to lure the kind of employees who can support the growth of the company's cloud business and encourage customers to accelerate their adoption of cloud services.

Oracle described the facility as a "sales innovation customer experience hub."

The 560,000-square foot campus located on 40 acres around Lady Bird Lake in the Texas capital will welcome customers who want to interact with Oracle's cutting-edge cloud technology and test-drive the latest products.

The campus will be largely staffed by cloud-focused sales agents, including many new graduates recruited through Oracle's college outreach program.

Oracle said the campus could ultimately support up to 10,000 workers, some of whom will live in a neighboring apartment building the company is constructing.

From the campus, Oracle will launch its Next Generation Contact Center, a customer support operation which looks to enhance the customer experience by leveraging Oracle Sales Cloud to drive the sales process.

A new Oracle Cloud Solution Hub will also be set up at the Austin campus.

The hubs—three more will operate at other Oracle sites across the country—showcase Oracle cloud projects in the works or already deployed in the field for customers. Engineers will be available to demonstrate Oracle's next-gen solutions, from AI to virtual reality to bots.

Roske, of interRel, said partners would benefit from Oracle making it easier for customers to get their hands on advanced technologies being developed—and they will have a role to play in facilitating that process.

"They want partners to contribute," Roske told CRN. That means recommending solutions to feature in the hub and customers that will benefit from seeing them.

At the same time, "just like any customer, we will be able to go down and interact with the hub, try new software, interact with engineers, hear success stories," Roske said.

The new facility will also provide a home to a program promoting startups working with Oracle cloud technology, the company said.