Oracle Corporation ORCL has announced its plans to build a progressive technology campus in Austin, TX to take forward the company’s cloud initiatives. The campus in phase one will cover an area of about 560K square feet and will consist of state-of-the-art amenities.

This initiative is expected to lead to employee expansion of over 50% in Austin by the company. Oracle in its bid to promote improved work-life balance for its employees has also unveiled its plans to provide housing facilities. For this, it will be buying out a 295-unit apartment close to the campus. As management stated, “We already have a high-performing employee base in the region, and the surrounding technology community is teeming with creative and innovative thinkers. Our state-of-the-art campus will be designed to inspire, support and attract top talent -- with a special focus on the needs of millennials."

Additionally, as per media reports, the company has also acquired an Austin-based startup called StackEngine Inc. for developing its Oracle Public Cloud domain.

Oracle is gaining ground in its cloud business as is evident from its second quarter performance, wherein total cloud revenues grew 26%. In fact, the company’s cloud revenues surpassed that of market leader salesforce.com CRM.

To benefit from the booming cloud industry, Oracle has introduced a number of Cloud Platform services in the last few quarters that will not only help personalize SaaS applications, which are currently in demand but also support easy migration of on-premise applications to Oracle Cloud.

The Austin based cloud campus will further boost the company’s position in the market. According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, cloud infrastructure spending is estimated to grow 26.4% year over year to $33.4 billion in 2015 and touch $54.6 billion by 2019, growing at an average rate of 15.6%.

However, the company’s continuing transition from licensing, where revenues are recognized upfront, to a cloud subscription model where it is realized over the years, will hurt its top line in the near term.

Currently, Oracle has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Better-ranked stocks in the same space include Autodesk, Inc. ADSK and Datawatch Corporation DWCH both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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