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The US company also plans to increase its sales resources in the region by hiring more than 250 sales professionals from the UAE.
The move comes as the company has more than doubled its workforce in the Middle East in the past three years, two years ahead of predictions.
In the course of 2016, Oracle plans to open new offices in Abu Dhabi, Dubai Internet City, Amman and Riyadh...
When asked whether Oracle will stop support for on-premises (customers’ servers) as the focus is on cloud, Hurd said that Oracle’s portfolio was both on cloud and on-premises.
Even though the applications and customers are migrating to the cloud, “we will keep supporting the on-premises licences as long as they use them. Even by 2024, there will be on-premises sales,” he said.
Moreover, he said that low oil prices would not change “our commitment to our investment” in the region.
“I do think that the overall lower revenue growth in companies will make an impact on IT spending and make them move to cloud. Moving to cloud is not just saving money, but it is also about innovation and simplicity at the same time.”
Hurd said that cloud is a big deal as many companies have old infrastructure and there is a need for innovation. He added that there is a lot of pressure to do things such as increase security and adhere to governance mandates which are not innovative.
Oracle currently offers more than 600 different cloud applications. According to Hurd, cloud is important because it offers a lower cost structure and a less complex environment.
Security has been an issue when moving the data from the premises to the cloud. Regarding this, Hurd said Oracle’s M7 chip was a game changer.
“We are putting the security [at] chip level and not on the software level. People are capable of hacking the software and so we decided [to put] it on the hardware level. Hacking the M7 chip is practically impossible,” he said.
He said that Oracle is encrypting the data stored on the server for security reasons. To decrypt it, a customer needs an electronic key and that is with customers.
Hurd said nobody at Oracle could read customers’ data in the cloud.
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