Oracle’s Chicago cloud region targets manufacturing, financial services

As part of its ongoing strategy to expand its roster of public cloud regions and catch up with larger cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, Oracle has launched a new cloud region in Chicago to cater to enterprises operating out of the US Midwest.

The Chicago region, which will be Oracle’s fourth public cloud region in the US and 41^st globally, will primarily cater to manufacturing and financial services firms among other industries operating in that part of the country, said Leo Leung, vice president of products and strategy at Oracle.  

The Midwest region, according to Oracle, is home to more than 60% of all US manufacturing firms and houses the world’s largest financial derivatives exchange.

“This is just going to give them (enterprise customers in the region) the capability of running their workloads closer to their headquarters versus other parts of the country,” Leung said, adding that the demand in the region is fueling the company’s growing bookings for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

CEO Safra Catz, during an earnings call for its quarter ended November, had said that the company had triple-digit bookings growth across its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services for the past two quarters and basis this growth, the company planned to invest $2.4 billion approximately every quarter for the next few quarters.

The new region in Chicago will offer over 100 OCI services and applications, including Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL Heatwave, OCI Data Science, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Analytics, the company said.  

Oracle has three other regions in the US, situated in Ashburn, Virginia; San Jose, California; and Phoenix, Arizona.

Globally, the company has a total of 55 cloud regions including national security regions.

Nine new regions are currently being built, Catz had said during the earnings call, according to a transcript from Motley Fool.

For the quarter ended November, the company’s total revenue grew 25% in constant currency, buoyed by revenue growth from its infrastructure and applications cloud businesses, which grew 59% and 45% respectively, in constant currency.