Oracle opens first Cloud region in Nordics, Milan

STOCKHOLM MILAN Reuters - Oracle said on Wednesday it opened its first cloud region in the Nordics in Stockholm, along with one in Milan, Italy, as the pandemic increased demand for cloud computing tools from private and public sector organizations.

Cloud regions allow customers near the region to get faster access to their data, due to the geographical location of data centers.

Cloud computing companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have set up new data centers across Europe to cater to clients moving from in-house digital storage and computing to leased cloud servers.

Cloud regions in Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK and Switzerland, are already covered by Oracle. It will have facilities in 36 regions around the world, with plans to add eight more by the end of next year.

The company has already signed contracts with potential customers in Europe and plans to open a second region in France and one in Spain.

Carla Arend, senior program director at research firm IDC, said European organizations want to store their data in Europe or in their local country where possible.

Oracle, which is best known for its database software, lags its bigger rivals in the race for cornering the cloud computing market, but its total cloud revenue rose 22% to $2.7 billion in the latest second quarter.

Oracle said earlier this year it will migrate the most complicated computer programs for free to its cloud in order to catch a new wave of potential cloud-computing clients.