Powering up GCC’s cloud: Oracle EMEA EVP talks growth, future plans

Technology giant Oracle has been ramping up its cloud infrastructure in the Gulf Region as demand for computing services in markets such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE accelerates.

This is according to Richard Smith, Oracle’s Executive Vice President for Technology, EMEA who recently spoke to Gulf Business on the side-lines of the Oracle CloudWorld Tour in Dubai.

“I spend a lot of time here and if I look at the last 3-4 years, we have been on an absolute tear building out Oracle cloud infrastructure,” Smith told Gulf Business.

“Demand will continue to build and our architecture is very scalable,” he added.

The company opened its Saudi Arabia West (Jeddah) cloud region in February 2020. This was followed, in September 2020, with Oracle launching its UAE East (Dubai) cloud region. In 2021, Oracle opened its UAE Central (Abu Dhabi) cloud region.

Apart from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Oracle has further launched new data centre infrastructure in South Africa and Israel within the last three years. 

Surging cloud demand

Cloud growth has been rising strongly in the GCC, in particular, as economies in this region have rebounded more quickly from the Covid-19 pandemic.

READ MORE: Here’s why Saudi’s IT services growth is fastest in MEA – IDC

GDP growth forecasts for the UAE in 2024, for example, currently range from 3.7 per cent to over 5 per cent for 2024.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is helping to drive higher levels of investment in that market.

Suraj Godse, a Senior Research Analyst for IT Services, Trackers and Data Products at IDC, recently told Gulf Business how cloud investments are picking up in the region amid this backdrop of strong growth.

“Huawei disclosed plans for a cloud region in Riyadh, Oracle launched its cloud region in NEOM, and Alibaba established its cloud presence in Saudi Arabia. Additionally, large ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) like Salesforce have expressed intentions to launch cloud regions, indicating a sustained momentum in this direction,” Godse said.

Late last year, Google also opened its first-ever Saudi Arabian cloud region.

Oracle, though, is ramping up its focus too.

“We have been expanding our footprint at a rapid rate and pace, and we announced an investment of an excess of $1.5bn in capital expenditure over the next five years in the region,” Smith told Gulf Business.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” he added.

AI and the cloud

It was back in the late 2000s that ‘cloud computing’ became a major buzz phrase, but fast forwarding to 2024, AI is now all the rage.

And in this regard, Oracle has inked interesting partnerships with major telecom operators in the region this year.

At its Oracle CloudWorld Tour in Dubai, the company announced an expansion of its collaboration with etisalat by e& to enhance the telecom operator’s AI capabilities.

As part of the partnership, NVIDIA H100 GPU clusters are set to be used by etisalat by e&’s dedicated Oracle cloud infrastructure in the region. Chipmaker NVIDIA is currently a global leader in developing graphic processing units (GPUs) that are used to power up AI Large Language Models (LLMs).

The telecoms operator is expected to leverage the Oracle cloud platform to roll in AI services into its business applications, as well as enhancing the efficiency of its business and operational processes.

“The reality for us is that we’ve been doing AI and machine learning for many, many years,” said Smith.

“We released a database called the autonomous database over four years ago, [and this database] is all about self-provisioning, and self-orchestration. So that’s been a core part of our cooking for a while.

“We can deploy these footprints and the GPUs very quickly. You could start with 10 or 20 and scale up into literally the tens of thousands,” he added.

Oracle and UAE telecoms provider du also announced a partnership to collaborate on launching sovereign ‘hyperscale’ cloud services as well.

Amid all these partnerships and developments in the market, Smith concludes by telling Gulf Business about how Oracle is building out infrastructure in the GCC, but still respecting data sovereignty and the region’s regulations.

“We focus intensely on the regulations that exist in and around our go-to-market strategies,” said Smith.

“So, in Saudi Arabia, they have a cyber security agency. And as they should be, they are ultra sensitive to the technology and the software architecture that you deploy. We do workshops with them, and they evaluate our technology on a constant basis.

“Frankly, we think it’s the right thing to do. Because none of us wants to be dealing or looking at that newspaper article or essay that talks about leakage or breakage or, you know, something that goes wrong,” Smith concluded.