To meet the rapidly growing demand for its cloud services in South East Asia, Oracle has announced plans to open a second cloud region in Singapore. Continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider, the new region is one of 10 planned public regions to join the 41 regions that Oracle currently operates.

The region will offer Oracle’s public and private sector customers and partners a new option to locate their infrastructure, applications, and data for optimal performance and latency. Customers will have access to a wide range of cloud services to modernize their applications; innovate with data, analytics, and AI; and migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). In addition, customers will be able to achieve greater business continuity by using both Oracle Cloud Singapore Regions together while retaining data residency within Singapore.

“Our upcoming second cloud region in Singapore will help meet the tremendous upsurge in demand for cloud services in South East Asia,” said Garrett Ilg, president, Japan & Asia Pacific, Oracle. “With the new region, Oracle offers customers true business continuity and disaster protection while meeting in-country data residency requirements. As a result, we’re extending our commitment to helping organizations in South East Asia embrace technologies like AI, machine learning, and IoT to address their most complex challenges and achieve more with less.”

Oracle first opened a data center in Singapore in 2013, taking space in Equinix’s SG3 facility. The new Oracle Cloud Singapore Region will offer over 100 OCI services and applications, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave Database Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. These applications and services will help start-ups and medium-sized and large organizations across financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail in South East Asia harness data to help uncover new business value and optimize applications, typically without requiring costly re-architecture. The first Oracle Cloud Singapore Region has supported the innovation needs of more than 1,000 customers in South East Asia, including Pacific International Lines and Siam Makro.

Spurring South East Asia’s Digital Economic Growth

In its Top ICT Predictions for 2022 and Beyond at IDC FutureScape 2022, IDC said that by 2023 digital will rule in South East Asia, as one in three companies will generate more than 15 percent of their revenue from digital products and services, compared to one in six in 2020. The strong focus on increasing revenue from digital products and services will contribute towards cloud technology playing an even more integral role in business continuity and resiliency for South East Asian organizations in today’s digital-first world.

“Oracle’s second cloud region in Singapore is a welcomed addition as the country continues to establish itself as one of the top markets for data centers globally, with sustainability at its core. Despite economic uncertainties, cloud spending by South East Asia organizations remains strong as cloud adoption continues to be seen as a business differentiator to meet the challenges of the post-pandemic future. IDC forecasts the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) overall public cloud services market will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5% from US$53.4 billion in 2021 to reach US$153.6 billion in 2026,” said Estelle Quek, senior research manager, Cloud Buyer Trends and Intentions Research, IDC.

The company said the new region will be powered by renewable energy by 2025, but didn’t provide details on how it will achieve this. Singapore has a dearth of renewable energy, with natural gas producing more than 90 percent of its electricity.

Oracle Cloud’s Rapidly Growing Global Footprint

Oracle provides a broad and consistent set of cloud services, with the same low prices, across more than 41 cloud regions in 22 countries. OCI currently operates 34 commercial regions and seven government regions, in addition to multiple dedicated and national security regions.

Currently available Oracle Cloud Regions include:

• Asia Pacific: Tokyo (Japan), Osaka (Japan), Seoul (South Korea), Chuncheon (South Korea), Mumbai (India), Hyderabad (India), Sydney (Australia), Melbourne (Australia), Singapore (Singapore)
• Americas: San Jose (United States), Phoenix (United States), Ashburn (United States), Chicago (United States), Toronto (Canada), Montreal (Canada), São Paolo (Brazil), Vinhedo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile), Querétaro (Mexico)
• Europe: Frankfurt (Germany), London (United Kingdom), Newport, Wales (United Kingdom), Zürich (Switzerland), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Marseille (France), Stockholm (Sweden), Milan (Italy), Paris (France), Madrid (Spain)
• Middle East: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi and Dubai (U.A.E), Jerusalem (Israel)
• Africa: Johannesburg (South Africa)
• Government: Two general U.S. Government regions, three U.S. Department of Defense specific Government regions, several U.S. National Security regions, and two United Kingdom Government regions (London and Newport, Wales)