In an attempt to take on its rivals, Oracle is expanding its global presence by adding new cloud regions in five countries. The company added local regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam). Oracle said that all of them are open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console.
The new regions in Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam give customers a second site within the same country. "Customers have told us that to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes. They also told us that those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements," wrote Andrew Reichman, Oracle Director of Product Management, in a blog post announcing the new cloud regions.
The first region in Jeddah, will be followed this year by a second region in Saudi Arabia, as well as two regions in the 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. Oracle is the first public cloud vendor with a region in Saudi Arabia," added Andrew Reichman.
Oracle informed that going forward, it plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where they operate. The move of adding a new region is a big step toward the goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil are expected to have two regions live by the end of 2020.
In the last six months, Oracle has opened ten cloud regions. With the latest five regions, the company now has Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud available in 21 fully independent locations. By the end of 2020, Oracle intends to have 36 cloud regions. By expanding the geographical reach, Oracle is stepping up its game to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, who are the major market players.
The company is confident that rapid cloud launches worldwide will make an impact. Oracle claimed that all 10 of the largest Japanese companies and 10 of the top Australian enterprises are using Oracle Cloud. They added that in the larger Middle East region 87% of the top companies by revenue use Oracle, and 54% already use Oracle Cloud.
