'We have to win Oracle over.' A huge upside for local tech is in sight

Chris Cochran believes Oracle Corp.'s world headquarters relocation will generate a critical ingredient for turning Nashville into a major technology hub.

But only if Nashville can actually keep Oracle's headquarters.

Cochran knows Oracle: He worked there for about six years, leading the Southeast region of sales managers for the company's large corporate and institutional clients. Cochran also knows tech: He is co-founder and CEO of Brentwood-based FreightWise LLC, a shipping software company that has topped the Business Journal's ranking of fastest-growing private companies three years in a row.

The combo of those vantage points gives Cochran perspective on the potential impact of Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison's pronouncement on April 23 that Nashville will become the company's global headquarters. Ellison co-founded the software business in Silicon Valley in the late 1970s. Months into the Covid-19 pandemic, Oracle changed its headquarters to Austin.

"It really was not functioning as their headquarters. It was just to escape California taxes and legislation," Cochran said. There was no influx of executives, he noted. While Oracle has a few thousand employees in Austin, Cochran called that headcount "immaterial" in the scheme of Oracle's 164,000-person total worldwide. Bloomberg this week reported that Oracle has almost triple the number of workers assigned to its California offices today as its Austin campus. Still today, Oracle's investor relations website shows an illustration of its office towers in California, not images of the Austin site.

"It's just quite clear to me that Austin could not win Oracle over. They never took Austin seriously, and Austin could not win them over," Cochran said. "I have no reason to believe Nashville won't be in that same spot. We have to win Oracle over. This is not done. This is our opportunity."

A lot is working in Nashville's favor, and Cochran said the area is well on its way toward making that convincing case. Plus there are these comments Ellison made about Nashville: "It's the center of our future. It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health care industry."

Oracle is two years removed from paying $28.3 billion to buy Cerner Corp., a health care technology company. That deal closed one year after Oracle paid $277 million to buy 70 acres of land on the East Bank for a tech office campus where 8,500 people could work by 2031.

"There's a clear industry focus in Nashville on health care that surpasses any other concentration of that industry one can get in America," Cochran said. "If AI and cloud [computing] revenue propel their valuation and growth like they're publicly saying it's going to, then their largest competitive advantage for a headquarters is Nashville."

'If we're going to be a major tech hub…'

Some impacts of Oracle's arrival are easy to forecast, such as more demand for housing, restaurants, hotel rooms and flights from Nashville International Airport. More traffic too.

Cochran highlights something else entirely.

"What Nashville lacks in the business infrastructure to really create a tech ecosystem here are the service businesses around technology," he said. "To get a legal environment that knows software [intellectual property] law well. To have M&A firms that cover software as much as they cover health care, that are local to us. Due diligence firms for acquisitions that understand industry-specific applications.

"That's where Nashville needs its growth," he continued. "Right now, most software companies that are blooming here, they go to New York, D.C., Atlanta, the Bay Area for all the services they need around it. If we're going to be a major tech hub, we need to build that here."

Health care companies have that white-collar supply chain at their fingertips. Oracle can spawn a similar support system for technology companies, Cochran said.

It's an especially fresh issue for Cochran. FreightWise closed its first-ever acquisition late last year, and he continues to shop for more purchases. For its first acquisition, FreightWise used attorneys in Washington, D.C., and sourced funding from New York City.

"Oracle is an acquisitive machine. They can feed that industry to happen," Cochran said. "It will be up to those legal firms and investment bankers not to have one tech person, but to start divisions and call on other software companies and make niches of themselves.

"I actually believe a lot of people are willing and ready to do that," he added. "But we've not had anything to push us over into critical mass. We needed a big announcement like Oracle to build that here for us."