March 1, 2017
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Oracle and Pluralsight Announce Partnership

Oracle today announced a new collaboration with technology learning platform Pluralsight, with the goal of providing developers with a range of cloud learning and enablement resources.

"This partnership came together as a result of our two sides trying to figure out how we could each help each other's network of learners. We have a tremendous inventory of content focused on skills that are very relevant to the Oracle cloud platform, in particular Java and Node.js development," says Mike Woodring, vice president of developer content at Pluralsight. "Where we were lacking was courses specifically on the Oracle Cloud platform, so we worked closely with Oracle to build out two custom courses designed in close partnership with Oracle that are actually all about the Oracle Cloud platform; then we surrounded them with a whole host of courses from our library."

"We really want to make sure that we understand developers needs and go to where they are," adds Jenny Tsai-Smith, vice president of curriculum development at Oracle. "We learned that Pluralsight is essentially one of the top digital e-learning vendors who are focusing on the developer community, and they have lots of great content already in their library, so we're essentially going to where the developers are and offering the courseware from Oracle."

The collaboration will provide developers with access to a number of Oracle learning pathways through the Pluralsight platform, including Oracle Cloud: Java Development, and Oracle Cloud: Node.js Development. Additionally, users will be able to access two new Oracle Cloud Courses, Oracle Cloud for Developers and Oracle Compute Cloud Service Foundations.

"They [users] are going to be getting training from Oracle, meaning the content is developed by Oracle developers, Oracle curriculum developers, people who are working with the software from day one, and we can offer the truth, the source, so that's the biggest thing," Tsai-Smith explains. "The other aspect of it is that we are very interested in learning more about the Pluralsight community—there are probably lots of Pluralsight subscribers who are not currently familiar with Oracle and we'd like to learn more about what they need and perhaps take that back into how we develop our products and what kind of products we offer."

Both companies are optimistic that the partnership will help build connections. "The main thing for Oracle is that we want to go to where the developers are already hanging out," Tsai-Smith says. "That is, for us, the biggest change, because for thirty-some odd years Oracle has been very inward-focused. Our training has been delivered through our homegrown platform, which we will continue to do, but now what we want to do is look outward and reach out to people where they're already congregating."

"The overall goals are sort of to bring the two communities together—we're trying to connect the existing Oracle community to the offering that Pluralsight brings to the table in terms of developer and ops training; getting awareness about the wealth of our training resources out to the Oracle community is key for us," Woodring adds.