Oracle is pushing hard on the cloud front with plans to extend its cloud services to further locations globally, an expansion which involves the hiring of almost 2,000 fresh staff members.
Don Johnson, executive VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure development, revealed these plans to Reuters, with the move reportedly being part of transitioning Oracle’s business software for finance and sales (and more) to new systems over the course of the next year.
By the time 2020 comes to a close, Oracle intends to have opened 20 more cloud regions – for a grand total of 36 regions globally – where it has data centers to allow customers to comply with any local data storage regulations. The new regions will be situated across Asia and Europe, as well as in Chile, South Africa and United Arab Emirates.
Cloud growth
Naturally this is all part of a bigger drive to compete with the cloud giants like Amazon and Microsoft for a slice of a cloud market which is expected to see strong growth, driven by the current ever-present economic instability which is causing companies to look cloud-wards in order to cut costs.
Gartner has predicted that the total public cloud services market will see growth of over 17% this year, rising to $214 billion, and will likely only strengthen from thereon out, reaching a predicted $330 billion by the year 2022.
The expansion is built around Oracle’s second-gen cloud infrastructure, and Johnson explained to Reuters: “We’re driving this very, very aggressively. We are very rapidly converting what’s a complex footprint to be a very simple footprint: Everything everywhere runs on our generation two cloud infrastructure.”
