Oracle bets big on data centres to win the cloud war against Amazon
According to Gartner, the public cloud market is pegged at $260.2 billion, and the highest revenues will come from infrastructure as a service.
Oracle is making heavy investments in its cloud infrastructure with the addition of 12 new data centre locations around the world. Analysts say that Oracle, which is entrenched in the enterprise space as compared to AWS, will use this data centre expansion to help enterprises leverage the power of the cloud.
Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd, in a statement, said: “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 12 new locations include China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea in Asia, as well as Amsterdam and Switzerland in Europe. Oracle will also open two new data centres in both Canada and the US.
This bet is clearly to position Oracle as a cloud provider rather than as an on-premise database provider. This move comes after Oracle has seen the cloud eat into its margins. Companies like AWS, Microsoft, Google, and IBM have made big bets on the cloud, and are clearly moving organisations to use public and private cloud environments.
Oracle’s cloud revenues stood at $1.5 billion last quarter, compared to $1 billion at Google, and $5.1 billion at AWS. Since each company has different methods of calculating their cloud offerings and services, so it's not accurate to directly compare their cloud revenues.
At OracleWorld, Chairman Larry Ellison unveiled an automobile database and also the future of the self-patching cloud.
"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," Mark said.
The future is in autonomous platforms and software. With this announcement Oracle does not want to play catchup anymore. Will it be a leader? At least, it has its global list of Fortune 500 companies to give it its break in the cloud.