Oracle is planning to hire nearly 2,000 additional workers as part of rolling out cloud services to more locations around the world.
Oracle had 136,000 full-time staff including 18,000 in cloud services and license support operations as of May 31. The latest development assumes significance because Oracle started cutting IT jobs in May 2019.
Oracle is behind rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft in the global Cloud market.
Oracle will add jobs in Oracle’s software development hubs in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India, as well as near new data centers, said Don Johnson, executive vice president of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure unit.
Oracle plans to open 20 more cloud regions – places where Oracle operates data centers so customers can safely stash data for disaster recovery or to comply with local data storage laws — by the end of next year.
The company currently has 16 such regions, a dozen of which it opened in the past year. Oracle will build new locations in Chile, Japan, South Africa and United Arab Emirates as well as elsewhere in Asia and Europe.
Analyst firm Gartner is expecting the size of the global Cloud market will be worth $38.9 billion in 2019.
Amazon is the largest player, but Microsoft has staked its turnaround strategy on the services. Alphabet Inc’s Google and IBM are also pouring resources into expand their Cloud market share, Reuters reported.
Under Don Johnson, who joined Oracle in 2015 after seven years in Amazon’s cloud unit, Oracle has built out its second generation of cloud infrastructure after a rocky first attempt.
This time, Oracle will run its cloud software applications, which compete with the likes of Salesforce and SAP, on the same cloud system it offers outside customers – a strategy long employed by firms such as Amazon and Google.
“We’re driving this very, very aggressively,” Johnson said. “We are very rapidly converting what’s a complex footprint to be a very simple footprint: Everything everywhere runs on our generation two cloud infrastructure.”
Oracle is also aiming for a piece of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, or JEDI, a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. The award of that contract was put on hold for review after Oracle expressed concerns about the process, which left Amazon and Microsoft finalists.
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