Oracle has announced a $1bn investment over four years to support companies that develop, sell and install its software, as the technology giant seeks to help its partners benefit from growing demand for artificial intelligence.
The commitment was announced on Thursday at the company’s AI World conference in Las Vegas. It will fund training and certification, testing and demonstration environments, cloud migration support, and sales through Oracle Marketplace, its online platform for business software.
The company also revised its Marketplace rules as part of efforts to strengthen its partner ecosystem.
The investment comes as Oracle cuts costs to finance the expansion of its AI data centres, highlighting its efforts to balance spending on infrastructure with support for businesses that help deliver its software and cloud services.
Oracle’s partners include consulting firms, software developers, cloud service providers and resellers. These businesses develop applications and artificial intelligence agents using Oracle’s databases and cloud infrastructure, while also helping customers deploy and manage the company’s software.
In July, Oracle integrated Google’s Gemini models into a tool that allows customers using its business applications to build AI agents.
“Our partners extend our sales reach, expand our delivery capacity, and bring their own innovation and investment,” said Mark Hura, president of Oracle Global Field Operations.
The company also introduced changes to its Marketplace, allowing customers to use more of their prepaid Oracle cloud credits to purchase products from partners.
Software developers can now negotiate prices directly with customers, while Marketplace purchasing has expanded to India and Japan.
The $1bn commitment is modest compared with Oracle’s spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The company invested about $50bn in capital projects in its last financial year as it expanded its cloud computing and AI data centre capacity.
Oracle also cut approximately 21,000 jobs as it redirected resources towards these investments.
In September, the company set aside an additional $700m to cover further job cuts that have yet to be implemented.
