The industry’s three major cloud providers are all actively targeting the healthcare sector, where adoption of technologies such as machine learning is fueling demand for computing resources. Now, Oracle Corp. is doubling down on the market too.

The company today announced plans to acquire a startup called goBalto Inc. that offers a cloud platform for managing clinical trials. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed.

San Francisco-based goBalto has raised $37.6 million from investors, including Qualcomm Inc., and counts major healthcare industry players such as Pfizer Inc. among its customers. The startup’s platform focuses on streamlining the management of so-called clinical research sites, the locations where pharmaceutical companies test new drugs with patients. 

According to data cited by Oracle, it can take as much as seven months to bring a research site online. The features that goBalto has built into its platform promise to speed up the process by automating tasks drugmakers normally perform manually. The offering can help firms find potential sites for a clinical trial, determine their suitability and coordinate the various preparations that need to be done before tests may begin.

Oracle said goBalto’s platform has been used across 90,000 research sites as part of 2,000 medical studies. The company claims that the offering speeds up site setup times by up to 30 percent, which can translate into major savings considering that the average cost of developing a new drug is estimated to be $2.6 billion.

The acquisition will help bolster Oracle’s Health Sciences division. The company offers several solutions geared specifically towards the healthcare industry, while its enterprise resource management software and other business applications are widely used in the sector. Just last month, Oracle struck a deal with Cleveland Clinic to build a cloud-based healthcare platform that will support the venerable medical center’s operations.

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