Oracle has announced the addition of five new cloud regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam).
With these five new regions, the company's Generation 2 Cloud is available in 21 fully independent locations. Oracle expects to have 36 cloud regions available by the end of 2020.
Four of Oracle's new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—give customers a second site within the same country (or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region). The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.
The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.
The new cloud regions were announced in a blog post by Andrew Reichman, director of product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Enhancing Oracle's cloud expansion, Reichman said, is a unique multicloud interconnection between Oracle and Microsoft Azure at an expanding list of sites. "We currently offer preconfigured, high-bandwidth, low-latency links between Oracle and Microsoft cloud regions in the Eastern United States, London, and Toronto, with more expected to go live soon."
According to Reichman, Japan has some of the fastest adoption patterns of any new Oracle Cloud region, with all 10 of the largest Japanese companies today using Oracle Cloud. Oracle's second region in Osaka will make it easier for customers to deploy critical systems of record in an optimized cloud, without being forced to store their data outside of Japan, he noted.
In addition, he said, in the larger Middle East region, 87% of the top companies by revenue use Oracle, and 54% already use Oracle Cloud. The first region, in Jeddah, will be followed this year by a second region in Saudi Arabia, as well as two regions in UAE. "These represent Oracle’s first forays into the Gulf with Generation 2 Cloud regions, a part of the world that’s been underserved by other cloud vendors. Oracle is the first public cloud vendor with a region in Saudi Arabia."