Oracle is going on a spending spree, with the company announcing that it plans to add nearly 2,000 additional workers to its workforce, while it will also be opening new data centres around the world. 

The plan, as reported by Reuters, will see Oracle attempt to take a bigger piece of the cloud market from its established rivals, Amazon’s Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. The company’s most recent step in that plan came last month, when the company proved that its cloud platform could handle large SaaS applications. 

Most of the new jobs at Oracle will be located in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and India, all areas where the company has software development hubs. However, additional jobs will be added through the opening of new data centres, with the firm aiming to add 20 more cloud regions by the end of next year. 

The opening of 20 new regions will drastically improve Oracle’s data centre infrastructure, which currently stands at 16 regions. While the UK is already home to two of those regions, Oracle has confirmed that it plans to roll out additional locations in Europe, with the UK possibly in the running for a new data centre. 

While Oracle has been dramatically improving its service since it appointed Don Johnson, a former technical lead at AWS, as head of its cloud infrastructure unit, the company still has some way to go if it hopes to compete with AWS or Microsoft’s Azure. While growth rates of both AWS and Azure are continuing to slow, the two firms held almost a 50% share of the market at the end of 2018, while Oracle’s share was below that of Google, Alibaba and IBM.