Oracle to open second cloud region in Singapore

Oracle is planning to open a second cloud region in Singapore to meet the growing demand for public cloud services in Southeast Asia.

The move comes just under two years after Oracle launched its first Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud region in the city-state, enabling organisations to achieve business continuity by using both Singapore cloud regions.

Each of Oracle’s Singapore cloud regions will offer over 100 OCI services and applications, including the Oracle Autonomous Database and MySQL HeatWave database service, with at least three fault domains to meet workload redundancy requirements.

Oracle said its first cloud region is already supporting over 1,000 customers in Southeast Asia, including Thai retail giant Siam Makro and betting operator Singapore Pools.

During a media briefing on the sidelines of Oracle Cloudworld Tour Singapore, Paul Howe, group CIO of Siam Makro and Lotus Group, both of which are owned by Thai conglomerate CP Group, said OCI offered the fastest way for the company to move its systems to the cloud.

“The other reason was that from a future perspective, we wanted our IT departments to focus on the business, so it wasn't just the convenience of the cloud, and it was not necessarily more expensive or cheaper,” he added.

For Singapore Pools, which handles an average of three million transactions a day, the need to keep track of its processes and customer experience had driven it to use OCI to monitor its services, especially during the 2022 World Cup when transaction volumes grew higher than average, according to Yeo Teck Guan, its chief business technology officer.

Singapore has a highly competitive cloud infrastructure market dominated by the top three global hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.

In recent years, Chinese technology giants Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent have also muscled their way into the market, offering a mix of industry-specific capabilities and low-cost cloud infrastructure options.

Although cloud regions in Singapore also deliver cloud services to organisations in other parts of Southeast Asia, some hyperscalers have added new regions in cities such as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Manila to address the needs of customers with latency and data sovereignty requirements.

Microsoft, Google and Oracle also offer sovereign cloud options, which are being considered by public sector organisations that would like to host their workloads in air-gapped cloud regions or want greater control over where their data is hosted and who accesses their cloud environments, among other requirements.

Globally, AWS, Microsoft and Google account for nearly two-thirds of the cloud infrastructure services market, according to Synergy Research Group. Oracle’s market share remains in the single-digit range, even though the company is seeing “triple-digit growth” in running both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads.

In Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, the market for public cloud services is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.5% to reach $153.6bn in 2026, up from $53.4bn in 2021, according to IDC estimates.