Oracle Opens First Cloud Region in the Nordics

STOCKHOLM, Dec. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle today announced the opening of its first cloud region in the Nordics to support the increasing cloud computing demands of private and public sector organizations. The Oracle Cloud Stockholm Region will provide customers and partners access to Oracle Cloud services to drive business growth.

The Stockholm region is strategically located to support the digitization of the Nordic region, consistently ranked among the most digitally advanced in the world. Most recently, Denmark, Sweden and Finland topped the European Union's 2021 Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), which tracks the progress made in EU Member States in digital competitiveness in the areas of human capital, broadband connectivity and the integration of digital technologies by businesses and digital public services.

Oracle's next-generation cloud is now available in 35 regions worldwide with plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022, continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider. The Stockholm region strengthens Oracle's extensive network in the European Union, with Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Marseille already available, a second region in France and one in Italy and Spain planned to open. Oracle Cloud Regions are also already available in the UK and Switzerland.

"It is important that we offer Nordic organizations access to cloud infrastructure locally to help manage their most critical data and applications," said Pelle Ewald, country manager, Oracle Sweden. "We currently see significant growth in our cloud business that reflects our customers' desire to rapidly scale their digital operations in an effort to continue to best serve their consumers now and in the future."

"European organizations want to store their data in Europe or in their local country where possible. Oracle's launch of its new cloud region in Stockholm will enable them to meet this requirement," said Carla Arend, senior program director, Cloud Research Europe, IDC.

Oracle's strategy is to meet customers where they are providing options that can enable them to have data and services hosted largely where they need them. Customers can deploy Oracle Cloud completely within their own data centres with Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, deploy cloud services locally with public cloud-based management, or deploy cloud services remotely on the edge with Roving Edge Infrastructure.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) helps enable customers to move their existing complex, mission-critical workloads and data platforms to the cloud, and build new cloud native applications, as well as potentially ting from its superior performance, possible lower cost, and built-in security capabilities. Customers will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, as well as Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Cloud VMware solution, giving them the choice to create the architecture that best suits their business needs.

Investments in the Nordics

Cloud infrastructure underpins the Nordics' drive for innovation and digital initiatives. Across the Nordic region, Oracle is supporting the next wave of entrepreneurs via its Oracle for Startups program, a unique acceleration program that enables mutually beneficial business-building partnerships for startups, Oracle and their customers. The program creates a virtuous cycle of innovation by blending startup ingenuity with enterprise resources to help deliver solutions for customers.

Oracle is also investing in the development of skills across the Nordics through Oracle University, which provides Oracle Cloud and on-premises software training and certification.

Customers and Partners Ready for the New Oracle Cloud Stockholm Region

Nordic organizations are using Oracle to manage their mission-critical workloads to take advantage of the economics cloud has to offer. Customers including Volvo Group, Skanska and Medallia will be able to benefit from significant performance improvements and reduced operational costs.

Martin Ahl, Director, Transport Automation and Blockchain, Volvo Group Trucks Operations, Volvo Group, one of the world's leading manufacturers of trucks, buses, construction equipment as well as marine and industrial engines, said: "Oracle has been an invaluable partner for us. They support us in innovation and exploration of new digital concepts in the transport industry."

Conny Björling, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Skanska, a world leading project development and construction group active in Europe and North America, said: "The new cloud region in Sweden opens up new possibilities for us. What's really beneficial is, that we can leverage information and data related to specific projects in the local country where required."

Björn Johansson, Head of Core IT and Cloud at PostNord, a leading provider of parcel and logistics in the Nordic region, said: "The opening of a new Stockholm region is a welcome investment in cloud technologies in the Nordics by Oracle. This will provide more opportunities for PostNord to take advantage of the security and resilience as well as the very low latency connection provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure."

Annika Rådeström, Chief Information Officer at ICA, a leading grocery retailer in Sweden, said: "ICA is constantly looking for new IT solutions to improve our business and work more sustainably. We have a long-standing collaboration with Oracle on their technology and applications. Oracle's opening of the Stockholm region creates opportunities for companies to benefit from new technology and innovation, and to do so sustainably."

Tomi Poikola, Chief Information Officer at Valtiokonttori, the Finnish State Treasury, said: "The opening of this new cloud region is a welcome investment in cloud technologies by Oracle in the Nordics. It will lower connection latency and enable faster digitalization and a better user experience for our services."

Mike Ottosson, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Medallia, a U.S.-based independent software vendor that recently selected Oracle as a preferred cloud infrastructure provider to power its Medallia Experience Cloud SaaS platform, said: "We are growing strongly in the Nordics and having a cloud region in the middle of these important markets is invaluable to our expansion plans in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. A local cloud region means low latency and ultimately a great customer experience. Oracle also gives us exceptional technical support."

Julian Dontcheff, Managing Director and Global Database lead at Accenture said, "Drawing on the longstanding relationship between Accenture and Oracle that combines Oracle technologies with Accenture solutions, we look forward to leveraging Oracle's investment in their newest cloud region to better enable our clients to innovate responsibly and grow sustainably."

Sustainability

The new Oracle Cloud Stockholm Region is running on 100 percent renewable energy so public and private organizations can reduce their carbon footprint. Oracle is committed to sustainability and has pledged to power all Oracle Cloud regions worldwide with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, South America, and eight European cloud regions are already powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimize their impact on the environment. As part of its renewable energy clean Cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6 percent of its retired hardware in FY21 while strictly adhering to Oracle's data privacy and security practices.

High Availability, Disaster Protection, and Dual Region Cloud Strategy

OCI's next-generation architecture provides a high-performing, resilient foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design maximizes performance and security. For example, each Oracle Cloud region contains at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centres for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures. Some regions (Ashburn, Phoenix, Frankfurt, and London) provide further resilience to entire data centres through multiple availability domains (ADs), which each contain three fault domains.

For business continuity, Oracle's unique dual-region cloud strategy enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographically separated locations. To help customers build true business continuity and disaster protection, Oracle plans to establish at least two cloud regions in almost every country where it operates. The U.S., Canada, U.K., South Korea, Japan, Brazil, India, United Arab Emirates and Australia already have two cloud regions. In addition, to help customers plan data centre deployments to meet application requirements and optimize their cloud infrastructure, OCI currently provides a no cost inter-region latency dashboard that provides insights into real-time and historical latency for Oracle Cloud regions around the globe.

OCI's extensive network of more than 70 FastConnect global and regional partners offer customers dedicated connectivity to Oracle Cloud regions and OCI services – providing customers with the best options anywhere in the world. FastConnect provides an easy, elastic, and economical way to create a dedicated and private network connection with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance versus public Internet-based connections. Partners available at launch for the Oracle Cloud Stockholm Region are Colt, Telia, Equinix, and Megaport.

In addition, OCI and Microsoft Azure have a strategic partnership that enables joint customers to run workloads across the two clouds. This partnership provides a low latency, cross-cloud interconnect between OCI and Azure in eight regions (Ashburn, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, San Jose, Vinhedo and Frankfurt), federated identity for joint customers to deploy applications across both clouds, and a collaborative support model. Customers can run full stack applications in a multi-cloud configuration, while maintaining high-performance connectivity without requiring re-architecture. They can also potentially migrate existing applications or develop cloud native applications that use a mix of OCI and Azure services.

Oracle Global Cloud Regions Expansion
Oracle provides a broad and consistent set of cloud services across 35 commercial and government cloud regions in 14 countries on five continents to serve its growing global customer base. OCI currently operates 28 commercial regions and seven government regions, in addition to multiple dedicated and national security regions.

Upcoming cloud regions include Spain, Johannesburg, South Africa, Mexico, and Colombia. Additional second regions will open in Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, and Chile.

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), Milan (Italy), Stockholm (Sweden)
• Middle East: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi (U.A.E), 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)

Additional resources

• More information on Oracle Cloud Regions
• More information on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

About Oracle
Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

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SOURCE Oracle