Oracle chooses Johannesburg for first cloud region in Africa
Oracle revealed to ZDNet that it has selected Johannesburg, South Africa as its first cloud region located anywhere on the African continent.
According to the company, the region was chosen as its 37th location to meet "rapidly growing demand for enterprise cloud services on the continent." Richard Smith, executive vice president, EMEA, at Oracle claims cloud services like the ones it plans to offer to customers utilizing the new cloud region have already "played a vital role in helping African public and private sector organisations ensure business continuity, deliver essential services, and meet evolving customer expectations."
Like many other existing regions, the new facility will be built around Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to help new customers "easily migrate IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or build new cloud native applications," Oracle said.
Oracle has already signed up several local organizations to the new region, including Airports Company South Africa, the country's Government Pensions Administrative Agency (GPAA), Accenture Africa, IDC, and African telecom provider Telkom.
Like the 36 cloud regions that existed before it, the most recent of which recently opened its doors in Stockholm, Oracle Cloud Johannesburg will support the company's full range of cloud-based offerings, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware solution, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.
Oracle doesn't plan to slow its efforts to continue growing its collection of locales anytime soon. The company reiterated an earlier commitment to reach a total of 44 global regions before year's end as part of the same announcement.
A full list and map of Oracle's current cloud regions can be found at its website, as can additional details for its plans in South Africa.