ORCL Oracle Corp

By Patrick Thomas and Asa Fitch 

Oracle Corp. plans to hire roughly 2,000 employees to bolster its cloud computing activities, underscoring how tech companies are ramping up their efforts to secure a larger share of the fast-growing and lucrative data-storage service business.

Cloud computing, where companies rent out data storage and processing power on demand, has become one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds for tech firms.

Vendors such as Amazon.com Inc., the leader in the cloud, and Microsoft Corp., the No. 2, have enjoyed strong sales growth as small and large companies increasingly put customer and other data in the cloud rather than using in-house equipment that can be expensive to buy and maintain.

Now enterprise technology companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle, that have fallen behind, are jockeying for ways to regain momentum. They are betting that many companies haven't yet decided which cloud service providers to use, or whether to move all of their computing to the cloud. Both Oracle and IBM say only 20% of the computing that enterprises do has moved to the cloud, leaving plenty of business to fight over.

IBM this year closed the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. to strengthen its cloud business. VMware Inc., the Silicon Valley company majority-owned by Dell Technologies Inc., in August announced a pair of acquisitions to bolster its cloud offering. And Alphabet Inc.'s Google, which also lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in the battle for cloud market share, said this summer it was buying Elastifile, a data-storage company, and Looker, a data-analytics service, to expand services offered through its cloud business. Amazon and Microsoft similarly have struck deals in recent months to maintain their market leadership.

The public cloud service market is expected to grow 17.5% this year to $214.2 billion, according to consultant Gartner Inc., and reach $331.2 billion in 2022.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle said Tuesday the new jobs include roles in software development, cloud operations and business operations. The positions will be at its locations in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, India, and in new data centers, the company said. Oracle had about 136,000 full-time employees as of May 31, according to its latest annual filing.

Oracle also has shifted jobs internally to bolster its cloud computing efforts, JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens said in a recent note.

"Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance, and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud," Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure Executive Vice President Don Johnson said. Oracle said it would make additional real-estate investments to support the expanded workforce.

Oracle Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison last month said the company now has about 40,000 cloud customers operating in 16 regions and would expand its global footprint to 36 regions over the next year.

Write to Patrick Thomas at Patrick.Thomas@wsj.com and Asa Fitch at asa.fitch@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 08, 2019 15:42 ET (19:42 GMT)

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