- US tech giant has been flexing its muscles in the infrastructure space after winning customers such as Zoom, 8X8, McAfee, 7-Eleven, GE, Sky, Outfront, CERN, Cisco and Nissan.
- Public cloud spending is expected to cross $430m this year and $1b by 2024, growing at an annual growth rate of 25% over the five-year period from 2019-2024, IDC says.
- Oracle on track to have 36 cloud regions by the end of the year.
Dubai: Oracle opened its 26th cloud region worldwide in Dubai in a bid to up its game in the infrastructure space and stay ahead of Amazon Web Services.
The US technology giant had opened its first datacentre in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi last year and a Saudi facility this year.
The second datacentre in Saudi Arabia is expected to come within a year as part of their “in-country” dual region strategy to help customers address disaster recovery and compliance needs.
The Dubai and Saudi facilities run on Generation 2 cloud infrastructure while the one in Abu Dhabi is Generation 1 and the company plans to upgrade it to Generation 2 soon.
Generation 1 cloud places user code and data on the same computers as the cloud control code with shared CPU, memory, and storage while Generation 2 cloud puts customer code, data, and resources on a bare-metal computer, while cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture.
The US giant is opening one region every 23 days, on an average, over the next 12 months and aims to have 36 cloud regions by the end of 2020 compared to 25 for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Oracle, which is a leader in the applications side, has been flexing its muscles in the infrastructure space after winning customers such as Zoom, 8X8, McAfee, 7-Eleven, GE, Sky, Outfront, CERN, Cisco and Nissan, to name a few.
Supporting economic growth
“Oracle’s second-generation cloud region in Dubai will help accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of organisations across the UAE’ government entities, large enterprise and SMEs, thus directly supporting the country’s economic vision,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice-President for Technology at Oracle MEA & CEE.
Moreover, he said that organisations in the UAE and wider Middle East have prioritised cloud-led digital transformation to achieve higher growth, drive innovation, reduce costs, and now to even navigate the crisis and thrive during the recovery phase.
“Our planned cloud infrastructure footprint for the region; two cloud regions in the UAE and two in Saudi Arabia are a direct response to the rapid adoption of Oracle Cloud in the region,” he said.
“We will see existing Oracle customers move their workloads on to the cloud and out of that, partly will be hybrid cloud, cloud at customer and dedicated cloud at the region, and new workloads coming on to the cloud,” he added.
Etisalat is the telecom partner for the Oracle cloud region in Dubai.
Regis Louis, Vice-President for Technology Strategy at Oracle EMEA, said Oracle’s cloud journey started 12 years ago with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and moved into the infrastructure and platform as services five years ago.
Addressing the challenges
“Many customers haven’t taken their critical and core business apps and moved them to the public cloud. We tried to understand what were the challenges faced by the customers and by doing so, we found that they [challenges] were enterprise readiness, complexity/risk verses RoI, data sovereignty and lock-ins,” he said.
That is when, he said that Oracle decided to create a brand new infrastructure cloud from scratch with a key focus on engineering to address the challenges and that is Gen 2 Oracle cloud infrastructure.
Hyperscalers are boosting their investments in the region as Covid-19 has given a shot in the arm to digital transformation.
Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice-President and Regional Managing Director for Middle East, Turkey and Africa at International Data Corporation (IDC), said that UAE-based organisations are prioritising digital transformation to navigate the current crisis as well as to compete and thrive during the recovery phase.
“Cloud is increasingly being viewed as the technology platform that can provide the agility, capacity and innovation capability that is required to accelerate digital transformation,” he said.
Moreover, he said that the investments by global cloud providers in in-country datacentres will continue to alleviate concerns of data residency and security among organisations in sectors such as the public sector, banking and others.
Well-positioned to handle broad use cases
According to IDC, GCC public cloud market (IaaS, SaaS and PaaS) is expected to grow from $956 million this year to $2.35 billion in 2024, at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent.
IaaS is expected to grow by about 33 per cent and SaaS by 24 per cent this year.
In the long run, IDC said that IaaS and PaaS are going to grow at a much faster pace as cloud adoption is the new platform for most of the enterprises for cost reduction, agility, efficiency and innovation.
In the UAE, public cloud spending is expected to cross $430 million this year and $1 billion by 2024, growing at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent over the five-year period from 2019-2024.
Gartner in its “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services” report said that Oracle, a niche player, is now well-positioned to handle broad lift-and-shift use cases (not just those limited to Oracle applications) and hybrid workloads, and has a future focus on expanding the worldwide geographies it serves with competitive capabilities.
Gartner said in its recent report that Oracle has demonstrated impressive improvements in both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities of OCI in the past year.
Between 2019 and 2020, Gartner stated that OCI improved from a solution score of 38 out of 100, to 62 out of 100. Its score on the required criteria vital to businesses improved from 45 per cent to 74 per cent.
Oracle to double its IaaS market share
Compared to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, Gartner said that Oracle is the provider whose scores improved the most in 2020.
Consequently, Gartner now recommends that cloud architects consider OCI not only for cloud environments that are anchored by workloads that use Oracle technologies but also for use cases centred on bare-metal servers, high-performance computing needs or high-performance networking needs.
The research firm believes that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, by 2025, will at least double its cloud infrastructure platform services market share from the current three per cent.
Many organisations continue to view Oracle solely as a software company, but OCI is a public cloud solution optimised by design to run Oracle technologies, with capabilities now broad enough to run general-purpose workloads.
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