​Oracle reaffirms investment plans for Brazil

Oracle is planning to boost investment in Brazil to accommodate growing demand from customers expanding their use of cloud computing.

The company is looking to double the capacity of its first local datacenter, built last year in the São Paulo countryside city of Campinas to cater for Brazilian cloud customers, the firm's CEO Mark Hurd told Brazilian newspaper Valor.

"We are very much committed to Brazil. It's a great economy with lots of smart people and good companies. [The recession] will pass," Hurd told Valor, adding that Oracle's Brazil business will pay "tremendous dividends" if it continues to invest during the current slowdown.

Brazilian organizations have increased the application of cloud within their portfolios in the past couple of years, as the technology enables a reduction in spending that's necessary during a recession.

Oracle's total cloud revenues, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), were $859m, up 49 percent in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. Last month, the company's CTO Larry Ellison said the "hyper-growth" in cloud sales is expected to continue for the next few years.