Oracle to Launch 12 Cloud Data Centers Around the World

Oracle announced Monday a plan to add 12 locations to the list of availability regions hosting its new enterprise cloud platform. Today, the platform is hosted in two locations in the US and one in Europe.

Most of the expansion will be in Asia, where the new platform, launched in 2016, currently has no physical presence. Oracle’s plan includes new cloud data centers in China, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. (It’s expanding in China in partnership with Tencent, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

Oracle is also adding data centers in Europe (Amsterdam and Switzerland), where the platform is currently hosted in Frankfurt, with an upcoming London region.

Upcoming North American locations include two Canada regions and two US regions, specifically for US Department of Defense clients. It's also likely that the company is planning a Dallas-Fort Worth region, where it signed leases for two 2MW data centers last year, according to the real estate consultancy North American Data Centers.

The company is also planning a cloud region in Saudi Arabia, where no major cloud player has data center as of today. Amazon is reportedly close to signing a $1 billion deal to build AWS data centers there, and Google is in talks with the Saudi oil giant Aramco about a potential joint venture that would build cloud data centers around the country.

Related:Why Oracle Thinks It Can Beat Amazon at Cloud

Like other cloud providers, Oracle is also working to expand the number of locations where enterprise customers can access its cloud services over direct, private network links, as opposed to the internet. Last month, it announced a deal with data center provider Digital Realty Trust to make those private links to the Oracle cloud platform available to Digital Realty customers in 14 US and European metros.

While it’s far behind the biggest cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both in terms of market share and the amount of infrastructure built around the world, the major shift of enterprise applications from on-premises data centers to the cloud started only recently. Most of the world’s mission-critical enterprise workloads still run in companies’ own facilities, so there’s still plenty of opportunity to gain market share.

Oracle had 0.3 percent share of the cloud infrastructure market in 2016, according to Gartner, compared to Amazon’s 44 percent and Microsoft’s 7.1 percent.

But Oracle has an advantage in the enterprise market over Amazon and another major market contender, Alphabet’s Google, whose 2016 market share was 3 percent. Oracle’s database technology is pervasive across enterprise data centers, and smoothness of transition from one architecture to another is a big consideration for enterprise customers. Ensuring seamless integration of existing on-premises environments with its cloud services would put Oracle higher on the shortlist of cloud providers an enterprise IT manager may be considering.