What Oracle’s cloud expansion means for businesses in the Middle East

To meet the rapidly growing demand for its cloud services, Oracle has announced plans to open a third public cloud region in Saudi Arabia. Located in Riyadh, the new cloud region will be part of a planned $1.5 billion USD investment from Oracle to expand cloud infrastructure capabilities in the Kingdom. 

The new region in Riyadh will join Oracle’s existing cloud region in Jeddah and a planned Oracle cloud region in the new city of NEOM. Oracle will also expand the capacity of the Jeddah region, which opened in 2020.

In an interview with CIO Middle East last year, Leopoldo Boado Lama, senior vice president of business applications for Eastern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, made clear that the UAE and Middle East are priority regions for Oracle. He noted that the company was investing heavily to enhance their infrastructure, physical presence, partner network, human resources, and other support capabilities in this region.

The company is bringing on 3rd May to Abu Dhabi Oracle’s annual flagship event, CloudWorld Tour to support the growth of Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s digital economy.

“Oracle is fully committed to help the UAE achieve its development objectives with latest cloud technologies, and we are delighted to bring the tech industry’s most definitive event to Abu Dhabi. Oracle Cloud World Tour Abu Dhabi will provide an inside look at how organisations are solving their most complex business challenges with latest innovations in cloud infrastructure, databases, and applications across diverse industry sectors,” says Nick Redshaw, Senior Vice President, Technology Cloud, Middle East and Africa, and UAE Country Leader, Oracle. 

Oracle Cloud has seen stellar growth over the past few years in the Middle East with several hundred new cloud services and features rolled out. It is continuing to see organisations from across the region turn to Oracle Cloud to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud.

The company’s SVP for Technology Software, Middle East, Africa, Turkey and Levant, Cherian Varghese, says the investment in the third data centre is due to ongoing demand and in preparation for the region’s future growth. 

“Oracle has been the only adaptor of cloud in the Kingdom. We set up our first data centre in Jeddah before and then [the company invested in] NEOM, so we already have two data centres in the Kingdom,” says Varghese. “Now we invested 1.5 billion dollars for our third data centre in Riyadh. This means we are going to expand our Jeddah region more because Saudi Arabia is moving in a big way to digital transformation and the cloud update is really good so no matter what the capacity we are putting in, we are getting more demand for future growth as well.”  

“KSA has always been a big market for Oracle’s business. We have been in this country for 30 years and we have good, loyal customers in the Kingdom – from telcos and banking to the public sector. The good news is that there is a big push for digital transformation coming directly from the Government which means the industry has become more agile,” he adds.