Oracle announced today that it plans to hire close to 2,000 new employees worldwide to help grow its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business.
With more organizations moving workloads and compute to the public cloud, Oracle is seeking to close the gap on cloud giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Oracle is trying to claw its way into the various private, public and hybrid clouds.
Oracle said the new jobs, which will include software development, cloud operations and business operations, would support its expanding infrastructure customer base. The company also hinted at "new product innovations" and more cloud regions around the globe.
Smaller cloud providers such as Oracle can still gain regional and national footholds in the cloud as businesses continue to make their digital transformations.
“Cloud is still in its early days with less than 20% penetration today, and enterprises are just beginning to use cloud for mission-critical workloads,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in a statement. “Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance, and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud.”
Oracle claims to be the only cloud infrastructure company that is delivering enterprise applications, which it says gives customers cost savings and a competitive advantage by enabling them to extend their applications as they grow.
Over the past year, Oracle has opened 12 new Gen 2 Cloud regions and currently operates 16 regions globally, which it claims is the fastest expansion by any major cloud provider. While Oracle may be adding regions at a faster clip than its competitors, it still has a ways to go to match the regions offered by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Oracle plans to add 20 more regions by the end of 2020, bringing the global footprint to 36 total regions.
With compliance laws changing from one country to the next, Oracle is working to ensure customers that their data is safe and in compliance. Oracle said 11 countries or jurisdictions will have region pairs that facilitate enterprise-class, multi-region, disaster-recovery strategies to better support those customers who want to store their data in-country or in-region.
Google announced a $13 billion U.S. investment plan for its data centers and offices in February. The company has major expansions slated this year across 14 states. Google has offices and facilities in 24 states, including data centers in 13 communities. From 2016 to 2018, Google has spent a total of $47 billion on capex, including investments in its infrastructure.
In June, Microsoft and Oracle announced an interoperability partnership that allows their enterprise customers to interconnect their workloads across both clouds.
RELATED: Public cloud market is nowhere near plateauing, says IDC
According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon once again grew faster than the overall market in the first quarter of this year. In order of ranking behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent saw their revenues jump 70% or more year over year, according to Synergy.
Following the top five cloud providers, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace have substantial market share, but have typically had lower growth rates, according to Synergy Research Group.