Oracle is boosting its cloud efforts with an announcement that it is hiring some 2,000 new employees. While Amazon, Microsoft and, to some extent, Google have dominated the cloud market, Oracle sees ongoing opportunity to expand.

Oracle has been making moves to take on the leaders, including opening offices in Microsoft’s back yard. Even more surprising, earlier this year Oracle announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft, working to ensure their products work seamlessly across each other’s cloud platforms.

As Oracle continues its cloud expansion, the company is counting on the relative infancy of the market, along with the overall lack of penetration. In addition, Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver the entire range of cloud service.

“Cloud is still in its early days with less than 20 percent penetration today, and enterprises are just beginning to use cloud for mission-critical workloads,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance, and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud.”

Oracle currently operates 16 cloud regions globally, with 12 of those being added in the past year. The company plans to add an additional 20 regions by the end of 2020, no doubt with the help of the 2,000 additional hires. By focusing on adding more regions, Oracle stands to gain strong footholds in regional and niche markets that the Big Three haven’t wrapped up.

“Eleven countries or jurisdictions will have region pairs that facilitate enterprise-class, multi-region, disaster-recovery strategies to better support those customers who want to store their data in-country or in-region.

“Today, Oracle is the only company delivering a complete and integrated set of cloud services and building intelligence into every layer of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s growing talent base will ensure customers continue to benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently.

“In addition to rapid hiring, Oracle will make additional real estate investments to support the expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure workforce.”