Oracle Hiring Thousands To Support Cloud Infrastructure Expansion

After a year of repeated layoffs, the company's workforce restructuring will deliver a surge in headcount to support a rapidly expanding cloud footprint.

Oracle will soon hire 2,000 new employees around the world to work on building out and driving enterprise adoption of its cloud infrastructure service.

While layoffs have been a common story in Oracle's cloud division over the past year, the announced hiring spree supports the company's claims after those rounds that dismissals were part of a process of workforce restructuring rather than an overall paring due to disappointing cloud growth.

The new hires will fill roles in software development, cloud operations, and business operations, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based technology giant said.

[Related: Ellison Looks To One-Up AWS With Oracle Cloud Flexibility, Alliances And Geographic Reach]

The coming expansion in its cloud division's headcount comes as Oracle continues forward with a major buildout of its global data center footprint.

The provider is looking to penetrate the top tier of the highly competitive Infrastructure-as-a-Service market by attracting international customers with more geographic choice, and lower latency, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, its Gen 2 cloud.

At the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison told attendees Oracle's cloud will expand to 36 regions overall.

Each of those facilities will host all Oracle cloud services, including the recently launched Autonomous Linux, Autonomous Database and emerging slate of data and security services, Ellison said, a differentiator against competitors like AWS.

"Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance, and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud," Don Johnson, executive vice president for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a prepared statement.

Expanding to 36 regions is a major operational leap—Oracle operated four cloud regions only a year ago.

A dozen have come online in the past year, and Oracle said in September it is expecting to open a new data center region every 23 days on average over the next 15 months as a strategy to bring online 20 more.

Prior layoffs targeted teams—and in particular software developers—that worked on Oracle's initial IaaS offering, now referred to as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic.

New engineers and business operations staff will fill offices in Seattle, San Francisco and India, as well as the data centers that come online over the next year, and Oracle says it will invest in more real estate to support that workforce.