Oracle Corporation (ORCL)

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Oracle's (ORCL) Growing Cloud Region Footprint to Aid Prospects
By: Zacks Equity Research | December 16, 2021

Oracle (ORCL) recently unveiled one cloud region each in Italy and the Nordics as part of its strategy to expand its global cloud region footprint to 44 by 2022. With the opening of the Oracle Cloud Milan Region, Oracle now has 36 cloud regions globally. Prior to that, the company opened the Stockholm cloud region in the Nordics.

Milan and Stockholm Cloud regions are expected to strengthen the tech giant’s reach within the European Union. Oracle already has cloud regions in Marseille, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, U.K. and Switzerland.

Oracle further noted that the latest cloud regions would aid business enterprises across Italy and Nordics to accelerate digital transformation while conforming to regulatory-compliance requirements and adequately meeting the data residency needs.

The cloud regions will offer business enterprises various cloud services like Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Cloud Applications services, and Oracle Cloud VMware solution.

The company is planning to open a second cloud region in France and a first cloud region in Spain, going ahead.

Oracle Corporation Price and Consensus



High Availability of Cloud Regions to Boost Cloud Business

Oracle is endeavouring to capture a large share of the global cloud market to boost the top line. The company’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products are likely to gain strong traction over the next few years as enterprises rapidly migrate to the cloud environment.

For second-quarter fiscal 2022, management noted that the company’s IaaS and SaaS business increased 22% to $2.7 billion, respectively. Management stated that the company’s total cloud business revenues on annualized basis totaled $10.7 billion, while the cloud bookings growth rate was faster than the cloud revenue growth rate.

Higher availability of Oracle cloud regions globally is expected to fortify its competitive position in the cloud computing domain. In October 2021, Oracle announced that it would open 14 new cloud regions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America to support its cloud services platform.

In November 2021, Oracle unveiled its first cloud region in France — Oracle Cloud Marseille Region. Following that, the company unveiled Oracle Cloud Singapore Region and launched its second cloud region in the United Arab Emirates — Cloud Abu Dhabi Region.

At present, Oracle carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Competitive Landscape

Oracle needs to watch for intense competition in the cloud space. The cloud space is dominated by the likes of Amazon’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services ("AWS") Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure platform and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google cloud.

Per a Statista report, Amazon accounted for 32% of the global cloud infrastructure services market, followed by Microsoft (21%) and Alphabet’s Google Cloud (8%) in third-quarter 2021.

In the last reported quarter, Amazon’s AWS revenues (15% of total company sales) rose 39% year over year to $16.1 billion. Expanding AWS services portfolio is helping Amazon to maintain its dominance in the cloud domain by gaining more customers.

Amazon recently announced the opening of an AWS region in Jakarta, Indonesia. The company now has 84 AWS Availability Zones spread across 26 worldwide regions. Amazon is looking to unveil additional 24 AWS Availability Zones and another eight AWS Regions in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Israel, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

Microsoft’s performance is benefitting from strength in the Azure cloud platform amid the accelerated digital transformation taking place globally. Microsoft reported a 50% year-over-year (up 48% at constant currency) increase in Azure and other cloud services’ revenues in first-quarter fiscal 2022.

Azure’s increased availability in more than 60 announced regions globally is expected to have strengthened Microsoft’s competitive position in the cloud computing market.

In third-quarter 2021, Alphabet recorded a 44.9% year-over-year surge in Google Cloud revenues to $4.9 billion, which contributed 7.7% to quarterly revenues.

Google Cloud at present has 29 regions with 88 availability zones available across 200 countries and territories. The company is planning to open more regions, including Berlin (Germany), Doha (Qatar), Madrid (Spain), Paris (France), Milan (Italy), Dallas (United States of America), and Tel Aviv (Israel).

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