Oracle (ORCL Quick QuoteORCL – Free Report) recently announced the opening of a new Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft (MSFT Quick QuoteMSFT – Free Report) Azure location in Johannesburg, South Africa. The new location provides direct connectivity between the Oracle Cloud Johannesburg region and the Microsoft Azure South Africa North region.
With the latest Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, organizations across Africa can now leverage 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 service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
In July, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. With this new offering, Microsoft Azure customers can easily provision, access, and monitor enterprise-grade Oracle Database service in OCI with a familiar experience. Users can migrate or build new applications on Azure and then connect to the powerful, high-availability, managed Oracle Database service, such as Autonomous Database running on OCI.
Oracle’s Long-Term Partnership with Microsoft: An Important Catalyst
Since 2019, Oracle and Microsoft have partnered to deliver 12 Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure locations worldwide, including San Jose, Phoenix, Ashburn, Toronto, Vinhedo, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Johannesburg. These locations provide customers with multi-cloud capabilities to run their mission-critical applications.
According to Walker, total spending on public cloud services in South Africa is expected to reach a five-year CAGR of 24.6% between 2021 and 2026.
The announcement comes after Oracle opened its data center in Johannesburg, the first cloud region on the African continent, in January.
The cloud region enables organizations to build high-performance, secure applications to meet data sovereignty requirements and build disaster recovery plans to meet the demand for enterprise cloud services across the continent.
Rising costs and competition to hurt the balance sheet
Acquisitions have played an important role in Oracle’s growth trajectory over the years. A late entrant to the cloud computing space, the company is trying to build its foothold through aggressive acquisitions. The company is investing significantly in these acquisitions to catch up with Amazon’s (AMZN Quick QuoteAMZN – Free Report) Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alphabet-owned (GOOGL Quick QuoteGOOGL – Free Report) Cloud, salesforce and IBM.
Amazon continues to dominate the global cloud computing space thanks to an increasing number of availability zones and regions served by Amazon Web Services as it recently opened one in Bangkok, Thailand.
Alphabet’s Google Cloud services have increasingly invested in infrastructure, security, data management, analytics and AI. It is expanding its presence globally as the company is set to open a data center in Japan in 2023, marking its third location in Asia.
As the SaaS market becomes overcrowded, we believe that not all acquisitions will perform to Oracle’s expectations, ultimately hurting the profitability of this Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) company.
Major acquisitions could negatively impact the company’s balance sheet in the form of high levels of goodwill and intangible assets, which stood at $74.1 billion as of August 31, 2022, up from $45.5 billion in the previous year. previous quarter.
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