Oracle to add 2,000 jobs to expand cloud business to more regions

The company also wants to open 20 more cloud data centres "regions" across the globe by the end of 2020

Oracle is planning to recruit around 2,000 new staff in a bid to boost its cloud offerings.

Don Johnson, head of Oracle's cloud computing unit, told Reuters today that the new recruitments will enable the company to launch its cloud service to more locations across the world, and help it compete against cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft.

As of 31st May 2019, Oracle had approximately 136,000 full-time employees in its workforce, of which nearly 18,000 were working in cloud services and its ever-popular licence-support operations.

Most of the new jobs will be added in Oracle's software development centres in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Washington State, and in India, according to Reuters. The company also intends to open 20 more cloud data centres "regions" across the globe by the end of 2020, in addition to the existing 16 data centre regions it already has.

New regions will be opened in Japan, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, and Chile, as well as in other countries in Europe and Asia.

Cloud computing enables big firms to have flexible pay-as-you-go IT deployment, without the capital expenditure of buying and maintaining on-premise hardware. According to Gartner, the cloud computing market will be worth $38.9 billion in 2019.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) currently enjoys the largest share of this fast-growing market, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google and IBM.

Oracle launched its second-generation cloud platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), about three years ago, and claims that its OCI not only provides reliable storage and fast networking, but also a number of advanced capabilities. These include AI-driven analytics and autonomous database, along with robust security.

At the recently concluded OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California Oracle co-founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said that the company is moving ahead with its plan to add many autonomous services to its next generation cloud by the end of this year.

At that event, Larry also unveiled Oracle Autonomous Linux, an autonomous operating system that, it claims, requires no human supervision to run.

Oracle claims that it is the world's first "autonomous operating system" capable of tuning and patching itself while running. The company hopes that by launching a line-up of "self-driving" programmes, it would be able to strengthen its somewhat weak position in the cloud market.

The tools may also attract long-term Oracle customers to shift to the cloud, although the company's past aggressive sales and licence-auditing tactics have ended-up alienating customers.