Oracle on Monday announced the opening of a new Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft’s Azure location in Johannesburg, providing direct connectivity between the Oracle Cloud for the Johannesburg region and Microsoft Azure South Africa North region.
Since 2019, Oracle and Microsoft have partnered to deliver 12 Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure locations around the world, including San José, Phoenix, Ashburn, Toronto, Vinhedo, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Johannesburg. These locations offer customers multi-cloud capabilities to run their critical-business applications.
The move follows Oracle in January opening a data centre in South Africa to provide local cloud services across Africa.
Oracle said in a statement, “With the latest Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, customers across Africa can now use the Oracle database service for Microsoft Azure.
“This Oracle service builds on the core capabilities of Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, and enables customers to easily integrate workloads on Azure with Oracle database services on Oracle cloud infrastructure (OCI). Customers could also easily provision, access, and monitor enterprise-grade Oracle database services in OCI.”
Nick Redshaw, senior vice-president of technology cloud in the Middle East and Africa at Oracle, said, “With growing customer demand for multi-cloud capabilities across Africa, we look forward to helping Microsoft Azure customers migrate their workloads to the cloud without the need for complicated re-platforming, while giving them seamless access to Oracle database services on OCI.”
Colin Erasmus, chief operating officer at Microsoft SA, said Microsoft and Oracle shared a long-standing history of delivering excellence on behalf of their mutual customers, and supported their evolving needs. “Expanding the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure to Johannesburg ensures our valued customers in this region can benefit from the choice to deploy multi-cloud solutions,” Erasmus said.
Mark Walker, an associate vice-president, Sub-Saharan Africa International Data Corporation, said the cloud has become the foundational technology for organisations to modernise their critical IT infrastructure and leverage the benefits of emerging technologies such as AI/ML, analytics, IoT, security and automation.
“The continuous investment in cloud data centre space in South Africa by the global cloud providers has accelerated the adoption of public cloud services across industries, including some highly regulated sectors such as the government, healthcare, and banking,” Walker said.
The total spending on public cloud services in South Africa was forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 24.6% between 2021 to 2026.
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