Oracle opens 5 cloud regions, first in Saudi Arabia

Oracle just can’t stop building data centres

Oracle has opened data centres in five countries and is on track to have 36 cloud regions by the end of the year, as the tech veteran steps up its cloud computing drive.

The company added local regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam), adding to the ten opened in the last six months and taking its tally to 21.

To give a flavour of the speed at which Oracle is investing in cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, which dominates two-thirds of the cloud market, currently operates 25 regions.

Each cloud region contains multiple data centres. Cloud providers are increasingly offering local regions to help businesses comply with data residency requirements in the European Union and elsewhere.

Four of the new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—are the second region in their respective countries. Although, Amsterdam is technically a second “jurisdiction” paired with Oracle’s Frankfurt region. There will be a second region in Saudi Arabia by the end of year.

Oracle intends to launch at least two regions in each country, to ensure redundancy in the event of disasters.

“Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where we operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal,” Andrew Reichman, director of product management at Oracle, said.

Reichmann added that the UK, South Korea, India and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.

Oracle said it is seeing strong uptake for its cloud services in the Middle East region, where companies are subject to particularly stringent data residency requirements. 54 percent of the “top companies by revenues” use Oracle Cloud, the company said.

“The first region, in Jeddah, will be followed this year by a second region in Saudi Arabia, as well as two regions in UAE. These represent Oracle’s first forays into the Gulf with Generation 2 Cloud regions, a part of the world that’s been underserved by other cloud vendors,” Reichmann said.

Last month, IBM opened two data centres in the Middle East.