Oracle set to add 1,000 employees in European cloud push

Oracle Corp. is hiring 1,000 employees in Europe, the Middle East and Africa as it expands its cloud computing services in the region.

The company is looking for workers with between two to six years of experience to staff sales, management, finance, recruitment, marketing and human resources roles for its cloud computing service, Oracle said Tuesday. The Redwood City, the California-based company did not specify which offices would be adding staff.

The move comes about a month after the company reported 58 percent year-over-year revenue growth in its cloud businesses, which allows corporate customers to manage data through a network of Oracle-run servers. The company sold $4.6 billion worth of cloud computing software and hardware last year, up from $2.9 billion the year before.

“Our cloud business is growing at incredible rates, so now is the right time to bring in a new generation of talent,” Tino Scholman, vice president of Oracle’s cloud computing for the region, said in a statement.

Cloud-related products now account for more than 12 percent of Oracle’s total sales. The company employs approximately 51,000 staff in the U.S. and 85,000 internationally.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa accounted for 28 percent of Oracle’s overall revenue last year, but sales in the region declined 2 percent last year to $10.6 billion, as customers shifted away from Oracle’s traditional enterprise computing software to cloud-based services.

Public-cloud spending is expected to grow 27 percent annually to reach $82 billion by 2020, according to research firm IDC. Oracle’s “cloud infrastructure products are gaining traction and should become a major pillar of growth next year, amid increasing competition from Amazon,” Bloomberg Intelligence wrote in a July report.

Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and others have all reported surging growth in cloud-computing sales. These companies have been adding data centres in Europe as the competition to deliver these services in the region heats up.
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