Oracle Opens New Cloud Region In Chicago

Oracle says the region gives partners and customers—particularly those in the Midwest—another option for cloud infrastructure, applications and data location.

Oracle has opened its fourth cloud region in the U.S. for private and public sector partners and customers, the database products and cloud vendor said Thursday. This is the company’s 41st cloud region worldwide and joins an already existing cloud region for government organizations.

Austin, Texas-based Oracle opened the new region in Chicago, giving partners and customers—particularly those in the Midwest—another option for cloud infrastructure, applications and data location, according to the company.

CRN has reached out to Oracle for comment.

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Oracle Opens Chicago Cloud Region

The news comes as Oracle continues to invest capital spending to meet the growing demand for cloud services.

In fact, this week investment firm KeyBanc published a report voicing “some concern” about Oracle’s growing capital spending—Oracle could end the year with $9.2 billion in spending to meet Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) demand.

Still, KeyBanc is “increasingly confident in the top-line outlook” for Oracle, given the acceleration in remaining performance obligation growth year over year—28 percent this most recent quarter compared with 22 percent the prior quarter—and the company beating Wall Street expectations with its $12.3 billion in total for the quarter, which ended Nov. 30.

During the company’s quarterly earnings call this week, CEO Safra Catz said that capital expenditures during the quarter were $2.4 billion, mostly geared toward meeting cloud demand.

The company expects to spend the same amount over “the next few quarters” with no expected negative effect on operating margins, Catz said.

The new Chicago region will offer more than 100 OCI services and applications, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL Heatwave, OCI Data Science, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and Oracle Analytics. The region has high availability, data residency and disaster protection, according to the company.

Each Oracle cloud region contains at least three fault domains. The Chicago region has three availability domains connected with a high-performance network, helping to enable customers to create highly resilient distributed application architectures.

The new region also helps ensure business continuity with disaster recovery capabilities using Oracle’s existing U.S. cloud regions in Ashburn, Va.; San Jose, Calif.; and Phoenix.

CoreSight and Digital Realty are the host partners for the new Chicago region’s FastConnect service—which Oracle uses to provide dedicated private network connections with higher bandwidth, lower latency and more consistent performance compared with public, internet-based connections.

Oracle has also pledged to power all Oracle cloud regions, including the new Chicago one, with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025, according to the company. All 10 regions in Europe and some in the Americas are already powered that way.

Oracle isn’t alone in the cloud region arms race, with cloud rivals including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud spending billions of dollars on these data centers to meet customers’ demand.