Oracle To Hire 2,000 For Cloud Business Expansion

Good news for once on the technology jobs front as Oracle announced it plans to hire nearly 2,000 additional workers, to assist in its cloud computing expansion.

Oracle of course is locked in a fierce battle with segment leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as Google, IBM and other players in the cloud market.

In June Oracle agreed a deal with Microsoft to make their two cloud computing services work together, with high-speed links between their respective data centres.

Cloud expansion

Now Oracle’s cloud boss told Reuters that the database giant plans to aggressively roll out its cloud computing services to more locations around the world.

According to Don Johnson, executive VP of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure unit, the jobs will be added in Oracle’s software development hubs in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India, as well as near new data centers.

Oracle for example is planning to open 20 more cloud “regions” before the end of 2019, in addition to its existing 16 such regions. It is said to be build new data centre facilities in Chile, Japan, South Africa and United Arab Emirates as well as elsewhere in Asia and Europe.

Oracle is said to be reconfiguring its second generation cloud infrastructure so that Oracle’s cloud software will run on the same cloud system it offers outside customers – a strategy used by rivals such as Amazon and Google.

“We’re driving this very, very aggressively,” Johnson told Reuters. “We are very rapidly converting what’s a complex footprint to be a very simple footprint: Everything everywhere runs on our generation two cloud infrastructure.”

Oracle had 136,000 full-time staff at the end of May this year, 18,000 of which were employed in cloud services and license support operations.

Job cuts?

In June it was reported that Oracle had quietly cut hundreds of jobs over the past few months, with many affecting its cloud services division.

Some staff at the time said they believe the cuts could affect up to 10 percent of Oracle’s entire pool of 136,000 employees, Business Insider reported, citing unnamed sources.

That report followed last year’s departure of Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s former president of product development, from the company after 22 years, reportedly following differences with Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison over the company’s cloud strategy.

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