In line with rapid adoption of Oracle Cloud in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, Oracle announced the general availability of its Cloud region in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Now, customers and partners will have access to all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Autonomous Linux, as well as Oracle Cloud Applications, to unlock innovation and drive business growth.  Oracle’s second generation Cloud is now available in 24 fully independent locations, with plans for 14 new cloud regions by the end of 2021. 

“Oracle Cloud is fast becoming the preferred digital transformation platform for private companies, public sector organisations, and tech startups in Saudi Arabia, and we are delighted to be serving the larger Middle East region, where 87 percent of the top companies by revenue use Oracle, and 54 percent already use Oracle Cloud,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President – Technology, MEA & CEE, Oracle.

The first region in Jeddah will be followed by a second region in Saudi Arabia, as well as two regions in the UAE. These represent Oracle’s first forays into the Gulf with Cloud regions, a part of the world that’s been underserved by other cloud vendors. Oracle is the first public cloud vendor with a region in Saudi Arabia.

Businesses in Saudi Arabia drive major transformation with new cloud region

Zamil Group Holding Company is a family investment company with huge interests and investments around the world. The Group offers its advanced products and services, and also provides excellent opportunities for investors and partners in all its industrial, petrochemical and service sectors

“With Oracle Cloud, we started to consolidate our applications environments worldwide to get better and centralized control, lower costs, better resources utilization, and more flexible pricing aligned with our digital transformation journey. Now, with the new Cloud region in Saudi Arabia, we will be able to get closer to our operations in Saudi Arabia, Middle East, and Africa,” said Abdulbary Atassi, Director, Information Technology, Zamil Group.

The General Authority of Meteorology and Environmental Protection (GAMEP) is a government body responsible for environmental issues, meteorological information and weather prediction in Saudi Arabia.

 “The General Authority of Meteorology and Environmental Protection (GAMEP) is one of the first adopters of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Oracle’s Saudi Cloud region. Our aim is to create an agile and innovative platform that offers enhanced availability and performance to migrate our SharePoint portal while using the latest managed SOA integration services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now in Saudi Arabia, and the support of the CSM organization, we were able to design a robust architecture, provision, and migrate our workloads in a more innovative way with lower risk within the Saudi borders to meet our data residency requirements, along with low latency, and strong data governance,” said Eng. Naif Dakhelallah Al-Orfi, Head of Information System & Applications, GAMEP.

AWINI App, a tech start up from Saudi Arabia, provides and electronic platform to connect the transport service provider directly to customers round the clock across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

“We were on Amazon Web Services but moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as they gave us a competitive price than AWS. The maintenance by Oracle is of real high quality and with no lock-in period for certain technologies. Everybody says that AWS is cheaper but in our experience, the prices are not consistent and sometimes can go really high.  We are now working with Oracle to connect our back end with their ERP in stages,” said Dr. Abdul Rahman Sultan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Awini.

“Accelerating digital transformation to drive socio economic success in line with Saudi Vision 2030 is a key priority for Saudi Arabia’s National Transformation Plan 2020 (NTP),” said Fahad Al Turief, Country Leader – Saudi Arabia, Oracle.  “Oracle’s Cloud region in Saudi Arabia is expected to accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions in the country and the wider region, as our second-generation cloud is the only modern, secure, enterprise-grade cloud that provides customers a strong foundation to unlock innovation faster and drive new business growth. We’ll help customers migrate to Oracle Cloud seamlessly as they look to scale their business for the experience economy.”

Adding Second Sites in Countries to Meet Customer Requirements

Oracle has a unique dual region strategy that enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographies for disaster recovery and compliance requirements – without having sensitive data leave the country.  Customers that want to run critical systems of record in the cloud need fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes with multiple sites in the same country to meet data residency requirements. To that end, the Jeddah Cloud region will be joined by a second region in Saudi Arabia, next year. 

Secure Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a second-generation security platform, conceived and architected on security-first design principles. Innovations like isolated network virtualization and pristine physical host deployment, enable customer isolation from other cloud tenants and from Oracle personnel as well as reduced risk from advanced persistent threats.

Oracle’s Continued Commitment to Saudi Arabia

Oracle has been present in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for nearly three decades with presence across all major cities in Saudi Arabia including Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. This long-term commitment from Oracle has translated into massive investments to help organizations of all sizes, in public and private sectors, achieve strategic objectives with digital transformation.

Oracle is investing in skills enablement in Saudi Arabia through Oracle University, the trusted provider of Oracle Cloud and on-premises software training and certification. All training is delivered by Oracle’s elite global team of experts and is made available in multiple learning formats for anytime, anywhere training. 

In addition, Oracle is supporting the next wave of Saudi workforce and entrepreneurs with a host of collaborations with leading organisations including the MiSK Foundation, Ocean X and several leading local educational institutions. These initiatives offer internship programmes, workforce development and trainings, youth readiness programmes, and trainings for tech entrepreneurs.