Oracle has opened a new cloud region in Singapore, pushing its Asia-Pacific footprint to nine and global coverage to 33 cloud regions. It also is offering 100 startups here$30,000 each in cloud credits that they can consume over the next two years. 

The new Singapore region would support increasing demand for enterprise cloud services in Southeast Asia, as the region's economy recovered, said Oracle in a statement Tuesday. 

The tech vendor currently operates nine cloud regions in Asia-Pacific, including two each in Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia. It is targeting to have at least 44 cloud regions worldwide by the end of next year. 

In Singapore, 100 startups will be offered$30,000 each in Oracle cloud credits over the next couple of years. It also will provide free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) training and certifications through to March 31 next year, which it said aimed to boost local IT talent and skillsets.

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It added that the training would enable enterprises to move existing mission-critical workloads and data platforms to the cloud as well as build cloud-native applications.

Oracle's Asia-Pacific Japan president Garrett Ilg said: "We've witnessed triple-digit growth in the business last year and want to help customers innovate and modernise, while helping them address in-country data residency requirements. With the opening of the new cloud region and initiatives to support local innovation and growth, we are reaffirming our commitment to Singapore and to the region."

IDC's associate research director for data centre Glen Duncan said in the statement that business demand for public cloud services was seeing continual growth in Singapore and across other Asean markets, with hybrid multicloud environments emerging as the "dominant" datacentre architecture. 

Duncan noted: "Enterprises are now demanding cloud services from their partners that are global, regional, and local, [and] sustainable, secure, and high performance using machine-based intelligence, policies, and automation. Data and services must also be fully manageable and transparent to support compliance with increasingly stringent national government privacy and sovereignty regulations."

Oracle said the Singapore cloud region would have a direct and private connection with its network partners via OCI FastConnect, which would be available either through the vendor or 70 of such partners worldwide. In Singapore, these partners included Colt Technology Services, Equinix, Megaport, and Singtel. 

According to Equinix's latest Global Interconnection Index released last month, interconnection bandwidth in Asia-Pacific was projected to climb 46% in compound annual growth rate to hit 6,002Tbps by 2024, accounting for 28% of global bandwidth. Singapore was expected to see its interconnection bandwidth capacity increase 42% by 2024, when it would be the second-largest metro in the region at 1,042Tbps.

The city-state was the top metro in the region between 2016 and first-quarter 2021 for enterprises across various sectors including banking and insurance, manufacturing, energy and utility, and healthcare and life sciences. 

Equinix said bandwidth demand had been fuelled by the global pandemic, which had compelled businesses to innovate by expanding their existing and launching digital services. The datacentre operator's senior vice president of marketing Claire Macland said: "As a result, savvy businesses are now moving four times faster than pre-pandemic levels in deploying this necessary digital infrastructure."

Equinix's South Asia managing director Leong Yee May said digital transformation initiatives and digital services consumption would further accelerate in Singapore, as the country continued to push its smart nation strategy. This would fuel continual growth in interconnection bandwidth, Leong said.

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