Oracle yesterday announced the launch of its first cloud region in Africa, in response to the continent’s fast-expanding demand for enterprise cloud services. The Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region will accelerate cloud adoption in Africa while also assisting businesses in improving their performance and driving continuous innovation.

Oracle has opened its 37th cloud area around the world, with aspirations to have at least 44 by the end of 2022, continuing one of the highest growth rates of any major cloud provider.

“The fourth industrial revolution, which is powered by cloud-led technologies, has significantly accelerated in South Africa and the wider African continent. In recent months, cloud technologies have played a vital role in helping African public and private sector organisations ensure business continuity, deliver essential services, and meet evolving customer expectations. The Oracle Johannesburg region offers a next-generation cloud to run any application faster and more securely for less, helping businesses build resilience, agility and achieve improved ROI,” said Richard Smith, executive vice president, EMEA, Oracle.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform powers the Johannesburg region, allowing clients to seamlessly migrate IT workloads and data platforms to the cloud or develop new cloud-native applications. Oracle also provides a comprehensive range of application modernization and cloud methods to help African businesses compete on a global scale.

Oracle is being used by African businesses to manage mission-critical workloads and take advantage of cloud economics. Customers will see considerable performance gains as well as lower operational costs.

Airports Company South Africa owns and operates a network of nine airports in South Africa, including the country’s three main international gateways: O.R. Tambo International, Cape Town International, and King Shaka International, which together handle over 40 million passengers each year.

“Airports Company South Africa is mandated to advance South Africa’s national agenda of economic growth and development while delivering a sustainable and profitable business. Cloud-led digital transformation is vital for us to maintain an agile and profitable business model. The Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region will offer us the flexibility to explore the latest technologies that can support our digital roadmap,” said Mthoko Mncwabe, CIO, Airports Company South Africa.

On behalf of the Government Employees Pension Fund (GPEF) and the National Treasury of South Africa, the Government Pensions Administrative Agency (GPAA) assures the effective, transparent, and accountable management of pension funds.

“GPAA is in the process of replacing legacy applications and refreshing its IT infrastructure. The timing of the Johannesburg region opening is perfect to enable us to lift and shift our existing and future Oracle deployments to the cloud. This will enable us to cut down on on-premises infrastructure and assist with the management of Oracle services, cybersecurity and disaster recovery,” said Meiring Coetzee, CIO, Government Pensions Administrative Agency.

“Telkom plays a leading role in South Africa’s digital revolution, providing the latest converged ICT solutions for a range of business and residential customers. The Johannesburg region will boost the local infrastructure capability of South Africa and the wider continent, and help organisations kick-start their digital transformation journeys,” said Reubin Layman, CIO, Openserve, Telkom SA.

“Our deep partnership with Oracle has always been one of Accenture’s most strategic and important initiatives to help our clients leverage the cloud and thrive in a cloud-first world. In this era of rapid transformation, cloud has proven to be a powerful tool for organisations to master change—in fact, we have found that cloud-focused organisations in Africa and Asia Pacific were able to achieve 1.5 times more cost reduction and were reported to be 3.7 times more likely to innovate as compared to their competitors. We have seen the benefits Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings to our clients and know that the Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region will further accelerate organisations’ cloud adoption and their ability to become agile, intelligent and digital businesses,” said Kgomotso Lebele, Technology Lead, Accenture Africa.

“Public cloud services adoption is accelerating at CAGR of 25 percent year on year between 2020 and 2025 in Sub-Saharan Africa and IDC projects that the growth momentum will continue. The role of cloud in enabling innovation is underscored by the priority organisations have given to it as part of their digital transformation initiatives. Cloud-based technologies have helped organisations weather the COVID-19 crisis and cloud is now helping them build resilient organisations that can withstand uncertainties. Our survey of CIOs in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria highlights that an in-country data center is an important factor for 60 percent of organisations that are planning to adopt cloud over the next 12-18 months. The Johannesburg region will boost regional cloud infrastructure availability. IDC believes that cloud has become an inseparable element of an organisation’s digital transformation and innovation roadmap,” said Mark Walker, associate vice president, Sub-Saharan Africa, IDC.

“Supply chain is mission critical. Kӧrber’s unrivaled portfolio of supply chain software, spanning WMS, voice, robotics and beyond, empowers businesses to turn what were once warehousing and logistics challenges into strategic differentiators. Our work with Oracle takes this to another level, enhancing our capabilities with the power of the cloud. We look forward to the possibilities our solutions and the Oracle Cloud together will bring the industry in South and Sub Saharan Africa and globally”, said Joe Couto, executive vice president, robotics and 3PL at Kӧrber Supply Chain Software.

Oracle has launched an annual “Graduate Leadership Program” in South Africa to address the skills gap in the local ICT industry and provide job opportunities for the country’s youth. The program aims to provide disadvantaged South African students with specialized technological and leadership skills in order to prepare them for a career in the information technology industry.

More than 200 graduates have completed the program since its start in 2014, with several gaining permanent positions with Oracle partner firms and other organizations.

Oracle’s approach is to meet consumers where they are, allowing them to keep their data and services close at hand. Customers can use Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer to deploy Oracle Cloud entirely within their own data centers, use public cloud-based management to deliver cloud services locally, or use Roving Edge Infrastructure to deploy cloud services remotely on the edge.

The next-generation architecture of OCI provides a high-performing, resilient basis for cloud services, and its physical and virtual network design optimizes performance and security. Each Oracle Cloud region, for example, has at least three fault domains, which are logical data centers made up of hardware that provide high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures.

Oracle has committed to sustainable development, and by 2025, all Oracle Cloud regions will be powered entirely by renewable energy. Several Oracle Cloud locations in North America, South America, and Europe are already powered entirely by renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions employ cutting-edge energy management and cooling technology to reduce environmental impact.

In FY21, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6% of its retired hardware as part of its clean Cloud commitment, while rigorously following Oracle’s data privacy and security procedures.

Customers can access Oracle Cloud regions from anywhere in the world, and they support every Oracle service and feature. Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware solution and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite are among the products included.

Customers can connect to Oracle Cloud regions and OCI services through OCI’s broad network of more than 70 FastConnect global and regional partners, giving them the finest alternatives available everywhere in the world.

FastConnect is a simple, scalable, and cost-effective approach to build a dedicated and private network connection with faster bandwidth, reduced latency, and more consistent performance than public Internet connections. Colt, Telia, Equinix, and Megaport are among the Oracle Cloud Johannesburg Region’s launch partners.

Furthermore, OCI and Microsoft Azure have formed a strategic collaboration that allows joint customers to run workloads on both clouds.

This partnership offers a low-latency cross-cloud interconnect between OCI and Azure in ten regions (San Jose, Phoenix, Ashburn, Toronto, Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, South Korea, and Vinhedo), as well as federated identity for joint customers to deploy applications across both clouds and a collaborative support model.

Customers may run full-stack apps across several clouds while preserving high-performance connectivity without having to re-architect their applications. They can also utilize a mix of OCI and Azure services to migrate existing apps or construct cloud-native applications.

Oracle will open seven additional cloud regions in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, France, Israel, and Saudi Arabia over the next year as part of the planned expansion of its cloud region footprint to accommodate increasing client demand for Oracle Cloud services worldwide. By the end of 2022, Oracle expects to have at least 44 cloud regions.

Currently available Oracle Cloud regions:

• Asia Pacific: Tokyo (Japan), Osaka (Japan), Seoul (South Korea), Chuncheon (South Korea), Mumbai (India), Hyderabad (India), Sydney (Australia), Melbourne (Australia), Singapore (Singapore)
• Americas: San Jose (United States), Phoenix (United States), Ashburn (United States), Toronto (Canada), Montreal (Canada), São Paolo (Brazil), Vinhedo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile)
• Europe: Frankfurt (Germany), London (United Kingdom), Newport, Wales (United Kingdom), Zürich (Switzerland), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Marseille (France), Stockholm (Sweden), Milan (Italy)
• Middle East: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi and Dubai (U.A.E), Jerusalem (Israel)
• Government: Two general U.S. Government regions, and U.S. National Security regions, three U.S. Department of Defense specific Government regions, two in the United Kingdom (London and Newport, Wales)

Source: Oracle