Dubai: Oracle said on Tuesday said its digital hub in Dubai will house a new team of 400 digital sales professionals.
The hub is being designed to help mid-sized organisations in the Middle East, Africa and Turkey transition to the cloud, said Richard Smith, senior vice-president for technology at Oracle Eastern Central Europe, Middle East, Africa and south clusters.
Oracle currently has eight digital hubs in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The Dubai Digital Hub will be located at Dubai Knowledge Village. The hub’s key features include virtual meeting labs, interactive customer meeting rooms, modern collaboration spaces, and Oracle’s first social media hub in the region.
Smith said that Oracle is well-positioned to make cloud purchases quicker and easier for the burgeoning mid-market. In that context, the cloud becomes critical as a way to reduce capital expenditures and labour costs, boost time to market and upgrade applications more quickly.
“The industry is going through a major transformation in the way IT is consumed. Cloud is the future,” he said.
Oracle will open its Abu Dhabi data centre in the third quarter of this year.
Smith said that Oracle has been working incredibly hard for last several years to accelerate its journey to the cloud and is making tremendous progress and transition.
Oracle has registered an 81 per cent year-on-year growth in revenues in service and platform as a service in second quarter and the total cloud revenues rose more than 62 per cent to $1.1 billion.
During the same period, sales of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which provides on-demand computing power and data storage, rose six per cent to $175 million.
“We entered late into the IaaS segment. It [Iaas] is a key domain and investment area for us,” Smith said.
Arun Khehar, senior vice-president for applications business at Oracle ECEMEA, said that Oracle has crossed 2,000 customers in this part of the world with 98 per cent growth in revenues.
“Going forward, we have a great opportunity for three key reasons — Smart City and Expo 2020, Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 and Abu Dhabi Vision 2030. The next big thing is the artificial intelligence and we are bringing it to the customers,” he said.
