SAN FRANCISCO — WireFlare CEO Todd Robertti describes his startup’s approach to IT as “all cloud and all cutting-edge technology. We use the newest and greatest of everything that comes out.”

And that, he said, includes Oracle Cloud.

The startup, which developed a project management platform for the construction industry, launched last year. It switched from IBM Cloud to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure four months ago. This is Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. WireFlare uses Oracle Cloud’s bare metal servers and virtual machines.

In an interview with SDxCentral at Oracle OpenWorld 2017, Robertti discussed his company’s migration.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure helped WireFlare deploy its product “ridiculously fast,” he said. “I’ve never seen a dashboard where you deploy a server and 10 seconds later your server is online. With some of the other providers like IBM, with bare metal it takes a day or two before they spin up.”

The startup benchmarked Oracle against competitors Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Liquid Web. “We chose Oracle Cloud because Oracle performed better,” Robertti said.

WireFlare ran several architecture comparisons between these cloud providers, focusing on input/output operations per second (IOPS) and storage options to support its Mongo database.

“It was very important we had a high-performance database,” Robertti said. “For us it was mostly IOPS and amount of storage available. Oracle just blows everybody else away with both the amount of storage for the price point, and the IOPS is multiple times faster than any other provider.”

The company still uses IBM for email, Watson integration, and S3 cloud-storage for its object store — but it may switch to Oracle’s object storage. “Oracle is rolling out S3 and we just got accepted for their beta yesterday so we’ll see how that goes,” Robertti said, adding that Oracle CTO Larry Ellison’s keynote discussing the new autonomous database piqued his interest as well.

WireFlare currently uses MongoDB, a NoSQL database. “I would like to know more about the NoSQL part [of the new Oracle database],” Robertti said. “If we were to look at another Oracle service it would be on the PaaS [platform-as-a-service] side of things.”

The only challenge and the only thing Robertti said he wishes Oracle “would do a little better” is its firewall. “I wish it would allow for a little bit more configuration than it does right now,” he said. “Other than that, I would recommend anyone give Oracle Cloud Infrastructure a try and they will find it performs very well and it's very affordable.”