Score another one for Seattle.
On Tuesday, Oracle kicked off its new cloud computing technology center in Seattle. On hand were several recruiting executives; initially designed for 100 cloud engineers, the facility is expected to hire a lot more and serve as an education and training facility as well.
“We expect this to be a big deal,” said Prashant Ketkar, the head of products for Oracle’s public cloud business. “We intend to hire more and more.”
This is the biggest move by an established software applications company into Seattle, an important development if Seattle is to continue as the center of the cloud computing industry.
Amazon, of course, is based in Seattle, and has the headquarters of Amazon Web Services there. Across Lake Washington, Microsoft’s cloud business, Azure, is a centerpiece of chief executive Satya Nadella’s plans to spur Microsoft’s growth. Google has also located its cloud business in Seattle, and Century Link increased its cloud presence there when it purchased Tier 3 last year.
These businesses, for Seattle the result of a combination of luck (Amazon and Microsoft were already there) and cooperation with local universities to build skills in areas like distributed computing, are for the most part about infrastructure, the management of lots of computer servers and networks. What Oracle is doing is more about building up the next level: software applications in the cloud.
“Seattle has emerged with enough talented people, and a growing critical mass of application providers,” said Mr. Ketkar, who worked on Azure in Seattle from 2008 to 2012. A few local applications companies, like Tableau Software and Concur, have done well in the cloud. Some other Silicon Valley companies, like Adobe, also have cloud businesses there.
Oracle has about 120,000 people, so in itself 100 people in Seattle may not look like much. Mr. Ketkar said that the center would play an important role in changing Oracle itself.
“The company will be very different in 10 years,” he said. “Sales is changing. The back end operations are changing. The size of deals, and who we work with in an organization. Everything is changing, not just on the technology side.”