Dive Brief:

• Oracle Corp. is launching "Solution Engineering Centers" within its regular operations to focus on the development of new technologies, according to Bloomberg. The effort will include new facilities in Reston, Va., and Denver.

• Oracle has listed about 50 jobs for the new centers, which will focus on artificial intelligence and virtual reality, among other things.

• "The mission of the organization and these two centers is to build and engineer cutting-edge solutions for our customers around cloud computing, Big Data analytics, mobile computing, Internet of Things [and] cybersecurity," according to an Oracle job posting, Bloomberg reports. 

Dive Insight:

Legacy tech companies have been challenged to keep up with startups over the last several years. Oracle is responding by launching a startup of its own.

The centers will reportedly be run like startups, where employees will be encouraged to try new things and experiment with new technologies. The approach may help Oracle attract fresh talent, develop new solutions and perhaps even stay ahead of rivals, serving as an in-house incubator for new technologies and strategies. 

Sales of Oracle’s on-prem software and hardware services have suffered over the years as more businesses move to the cloud, so Oracle has been on a mission to reinvent itself. The company is pushing its IaaS and PaaS cloud efforts especially hard.

Those efforts appear to be paying off a bit. In March, Oracle announced fiscal 2017 Q3 results, reporting its total cloud and on-premise software revenues were $7.4 billion year-over-year.