YellowDog Wins Oracle Award for ‘Excellence in Innovation’

• Bristol-based start-up awarded for its innovative use of Oracle Bare Metal Cloud during Oracle Open World 2016
• YellowDog uses the cloud  and crowd sources processing power and is creating the world’s fastest super computer
• Gareth Williams, Founder and Managing Director, participated in start-up panel debate with Reggie Bradford, Oracle SVP of Product Development, during Oracle OpenWorld 2016

YellowDog walked off with one of the top prizes at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld event with the Platform Innovation award, which is part of Oracle’s Excellence Awards.  The Bristol-based start-up was selected due to its innovative platform that harnesses and monetizes under-utilised computer power for fast CGI rendering services. The Oracle awards were given at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld (#OOW16) held in mid-September in San Francisco.  Oracle recognised 31 companies from across the globe for their use of Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS services in new and innovative ways to transform their businesses, drive innovation, and gain a competitive advantage.

As part of its business model, YellowDog has been using the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Service alongside crowd-sourced spare computer power to offer the 3D animation and architectural visualization industry peerless rendering services.  Animators and 3D artists alike require high intensity computer power to render animations and hi-res images which is fraught with problems over availability and quality, not to mention price.  Previously, YellowDog used other public cloud providers but with the data transfer volumes and compute performance required, they often had to stretch their operational capabilities.  With Oracle Bare Metal Cloud, YellowDog was able to get its product environment running twice as fast as other instances, with one result nearly 10x faster than current instances.

The annual awards are given to winners based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation and the originality of architecture.   During Oracle OpenWorld 2016, Gareth Williams, CEO at YellowDog, chatted with Oracle Senior Vice President of Product Development and entrepreneur, Reggie Bradford about their collaboration and how Oracle’s cloud innovation has assisted the start-up and featured in several reports including TechCloud and Computer Weekly.

Speaking about YellowDog’s success, Gareth said:

“It’s wonderful to receive this award and it is credit to Oracle to be on the ball with young, innovative start-ups.  We’ve been very impressed since we started working with the Oracle Cloud team – their responsiveness, agility, and make-it-happen attitude is brilliant.  We’re beginning to revolutionise the on-demand computer market for power hungry rendering applications. Being recognised as an innovator by one of the world’s largest tech firms is a fantastic accolade.”

Deepak Patil, Vice President of Product Development commented:

“Cloud computing enables rapid innovation, and YellowDog is a great example of an organization that is using it to revolutionize its industry. By utilizing Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Service, YellowDog is changing the way in which 3D animation studios and design artists leverage the cloud to render high resolution digital assets. We are thrilled to see YellowDog’s creative use of the Oracle Cloud Platform, and pleased to recognize them with Oracle’s Excellence Awards.

This award is the second for YellowDog as CEO, Gareth Williams, was also selected for Insider South West’s 2016 42 under 42 alumni who are named ‘entrepreneurs to watch’. YellowDog has recently concluded its third round of funding, raising around £525,000 from a select group of Angel investors.  This brings the total fund raised to just over £1 million in 18 months.  The capital will provide investment to develop YellowDog’s platform use by other suitable applications ready for launch in early 2017.