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Oracle wants to further expand its cloud computing services. With that in mind, the company is going to hire 2,000 additional employees.

By hiring additional people and further expanding their services, the intention is to compete better with rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. In addition, it will contribute to the goal of bringing business software for finance, sales and other functions to new systems next year.

The new jobs will be located at Oracle’s software development hubs in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India. There will also be jobs close to new data centers, said Don Johnson, executive vice president of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure department, to Reuters.

The company had approximately 136,000 full-time employees on May 31st. 18,000 of them worked on cloud services and licensing support operations.

Twenty new regions

The company plans to access 20 new cloud regions by the end of 2020. These locations will all have data centers where customers can store data for disaster recovery or to comply with local data laws. The company currently has 16 such regions; a dozen of them opened up in the past year already. The new data centers will be located in Chile, Japan, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and other places in Asia and Europe.

Software to cloud

Oracle also wants to expand its cloud infrastructure. Their cloud software applications – which compete with, among others, SAP – run on the same cloud system that is also offered to customers. This strategy is also used by Amazon and Google.

The company had already taken steps towards a cloud infrastructure, but this did not go without a hitch. Under Johnson, who joined the cloud provider in 2015, the second generation was set up.

“We are very rapidly converting what’s a complex footprint to be a very simple footprint: Everything everywhere runs on our generation two cloud infrastructure,” Johnson said about the matter.