By the end of 2020, Oracle plans to open 20 more cloud “regions” or places where the company operates data centers for customers to safely stash data for disaster recovery or to comply with local data storage laws. Currently, Oracle has 16 such regions, a dozen of which were opened in the past year.

Now with expansion plans in new locations including Chile, Japan, South Africa and United Arab Emirates, and some new places in Asia and Europe, plans to hire nearly 2,000 additional employees. 

Oracle’s business expansion plan and upcoming hiring spree seems to be to compete with rivals like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. Further, the new expansion plan will also help transition Oracle’s business software for finance, sales and other functions to new systems over the next year.

The American multinational had some 1,36,000 full-time staff, of which 18,000 were employed in cloud services and license support operations. As per the report, the new roles will be created for Oracle’s software development hubs in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India, as well as near new data centers. 

Don Johnson, Executive Vice President of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure unit shared, “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.”

With the space where businesses pay a cloud provider to handle their computing and storage tasks instead of building out their own data centers being estimated to be worth $38.9 Bn in 2019 by Gartner, Oracle can look forward to a good traction. However, it competes with other major players like Amazon and Microsoft, who has staked its turnaround strategy on the services. Further, attracting and hiring the right talent with the required skills is also not going to be a cakewalk for Oracle. The skills shortage at global level can cause some hindrance in Oracle’s aggressive expansion plan. 

Image Credits: Financial Times