Oracle expanding global footprint with 12 new data centre regions
Wed 14 Feb 2018
Oracle is building out its cloud offering, announcing plans today for a rapid expansion program including the creation of 12 new data centre regions, predominantly in Asia.
The software giant is currently well down the stakes in the cloud races, with a very small market share compared to major players such as AWS and Azure.
However, thanks to its position as a major legacy player, with a lot of its software being used in enterprise on-premises data centres, it has an opportunity to make gains in the cloud market.
With this announcement, the company aims to increase the breadth and depth of its cloud services across Asia, Europe and the Americas. By expanding its regional cloud infrastructure footprint, it hopes to access more customers and partners. According to the firm, this expansion is as a result of increased demand.
“The future of IT is autonomous. With our expanded, modern data centres, Oracle is uniquely suited to deliver the most autonomous technologies in the world,” said Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO. “As we invest, our margins will continue to expand. And with our global data centre expansion, we are able to help customers lower IT costs, mitigate risks and compete like they never have before.”
The development of the firm’s footprint will predominantly be focussed on Asia, with new regions in China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea.
In Europe, the Netherlands and Switzerland will see investment from Oracle, while the firm will expand its presence in North America with two new regions in Canada and the U.S., the latter of which will go towards supporting Department of Defense work.
Oracle claims that customers in more than 195 countries are using Oracle Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run applications. It also states that organisations are turning to the firm in record numbers for application build and deployment.
Despite this, the most recent market share report from Gartner found that the firm had a 0.3% market share, compared to the 35% share that AWS enjoys.
Findings from Synergy Research show that though a number of competitors are gaining ground on AWS, for the time being, it is still by far and away the most dominant player, meaning names like Oracle have a lot of catching up to do.
