US tech heavyweight Oracle goes live with its second data centre in UAE, this time in Abu Dhabi
New Abu Dhabi facility and another in Saudi Arabia's NEOM will give Oracle serious clout
Dubai: Oracle has its second data centre in the UAE up and running. The new one is in Abu Dhabi and adds more firepower to the US enterprise giant’s ambitions in the region’s cloud computing and data analytics space.
Oracle opened its Dubai facility last year, and will also have two in Saudi Arabia. The data centre space is the latest battleground for the world’s tech majors, with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services already well invested to secure more of the blue-chip contracts up fro grabs.
Abiy Yeshitla, Vice-President – Cloud at Oracle Middle East and Africa talks to Gulf News about what’s in store from his company now that it has its date centres in place.
Do the Dubai and Abu Dhabi data centres only handle the need of UAE clients?
Oracle ‘cloud regions’ in the UAE are serving customers in the UAE, in the Middle East and globally. The cloud regions in the UAE are built on the same blueprint as our data centres worldwide, which enables us to handle petabytes of data and thousands of processing power cores.
Our goal is to offer regions in proximity to our customers to meet their data sovereignty requirements, while providing true disaster protection with multiple geographically distributed cloud regions in every country.
In the Middle East, is cloud and data hosting now the biggest chunk of your revenue mix? Or is it still enterprise servers and software by a mile?
While announcing the Q1-22 results, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, “Oracle’s two new cloud businesses, IaaS and SaaS, are now over 25 per cent of our total revenue with an annual run rate of $10 billion. Taken together, IaaS and SaaS are Oracle’s fastest growing and highest margin new businesses. As these two cloud businesses continue to grow they will help expand our overall profit margins and push earnings per share higher.”
We are witnessing similar growth trend in the Middle East.
In the Gulf, how many data centres do you plan to have eventually? Do these handle all of the cloud needs?
We have announced plans to set up four cloud regions in the Middle East. Two each in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. With today’s launch of our cloud region in Abu Dhabi, three of our regions are now live in the Middle East, the other two in Jeddah and Dubai.
We recently announced NEOM as the location of our second cloud region in Saudi Arabia. Both Oracle Cloud regions in the UAE are built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which enable customers to easily migrate existing workloads and data platforms or build new cloud native applications.
Customers will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, as well as Oracle Autonomous Database, giving them the opportunity and choice to create the architecture that best suits their business needs.