Oracle Corp. has said it had added new cloud computing data centers in five countries and aims to have them in 36 locations by the end of 2020, as it races with Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp for market share.
After a rocky start in the cloud business, Oracle, a longtime business software provider, is rolling out its second generation of cloud systems, in which it operates data centers and customers rent capacity from it.
According to Reuters, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the two top players with more than two-thirds of the global market in 2019, according to Forrester Research, but Oracle is trying to win customers by extending its geographical reach.
The executive vice president of engineering in Oracle’s cloud unit, Clay Magouyrk, said new data privacy regulations in the European Union and elsewhere meant many businesses must retain data in the country where it was generated, making it important to offer them cloud data centers in as many places as possible.
Oracle’s goal is to have at least two “regions,” in each country where it operates, so that customers can have one primary region and one as a backup in case of disaster, he said.
“Overall, the strategy is to put lots of regions around the world to give customers data sovereignty,” he said.
Each cloud vendor promotes its data center footprint with different terminology, but in most cases a “region” can have multiple data centers in physically separate locations called “availability” zones or domains. Microsoft has 56 regions. Amazon has 22 regions but has 69 availability zones.
Oracle on Monday added regions in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Osaka, Japan; Melbourne, Australia; Montreal, Canada; and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The company plans to add a second region in Saudi Arabia this year, as well as two in the United Arab Emirates.
Oracle said the 10 largest businesses in Japan were using its cloud computing offerings, but did not give any names.
