Oracle is stepping up its efforts to prevent the three big cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — poaching its customers, by building more data centres over the next two years.
The company announced its plan at its CloudWorld conference in New York on Monday US time.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the database giant planned a fourfold increase in its data centres, with 12 new centres planned.
Two each will be in the US and Canada, and one apiece in India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
{loadposition sam08}Of the remaining two, one is planned to be built in China in collaboration with multinational investment holding conglomerate Tencent. The other data centre will be in Saudi Arabia, where it was recently reported that Google is in talks with the state oil company, Saudi Aramco, to build a large technology hub.
The WSJ said Amazon, Microsoft and Google were trying to take customers who were using Oracle's database and convert them to using Web-based computing services in their data centres.
The report said that the gamble Oracle was taking was a costly one, pointing that Amazon, Microsoft and Google had spent US$41.6 billion in capital expenditure and capital-lease deals last year, a rise of 33%.
Oracle's spending was US$2.04 billion for the 12 months ending on 30 November 2017. The company's senior vice-president of product development, Don Johnson, was quoted as saying that apart from the 12 locations named, there were plans for other data centres too.
Johnson refused to say whether the plan to build the data centres was due to the new US tax laws. He also did not specify how much the ambitious programme would cost.
The report cited figures from technology research firm Gartner that showed Amazon Web Services dominated the market with 44.2% share in 2016, while Microsoft was No. 2 at 7.1%. Oracle was miles behind with a 0.3% share.