The ride-hailing and delivery company, Uber Technologies, has unveiled its multi-cloud strategy, announcing new and expanded cloud partnerships with Oracle Corp and Google Cloud.
Uber has tapped the cloud providers with plans to modernise its data infrastructure by moving a bulk of its most critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud.
The firm expects the new cloud deals to enable it to focus resources towards delivering new products and increasing profitability.
Uber, which has around 23 percent stake in Grab in lieu of moving out of Southeast Asia (SEA), has operations in other countries of Asia, such as India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the partners will help Uber to “maximise innovation” while reducing overall infrastructure costs.
“Oracle provides an ideal combination of price, performance, flexibility, and security to help us deliver incredible customer service, build new products, and increase profitability,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement.
As with Google, Uber will take advantage of its cloud services, including data cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, security, and microservices. Additionally, it will also use Ads and Google Maps Platform, to modernise its architecture and accelerate application development, and Cloud Spanner for rapid scalability.
Apart from migrations, Khosrowshahi said they intend to enhance the customer experience for Uber users, drivers, and merchants.
“Google will provide technical investments to assist us in efforts to reduce cost per trip, accelerate new revenue channels, and improve in-house analytics and customer experiences,” he added.
Google has hinted at future plans to improve Uber app performance on the Play and Android platforms. Oracle also has also unveiled extended ideas to support additional retail and delivery services.
Uber has primarily relied on its own on-premises data centres with around 95 percent of its IT currently housed in them. It’s now understood that the company will close down its own on-premises data centres, migrating entirely to the cloud.
Using a cloud provider lessens the firm's reliance on hardware supply chains, and allows us to take advantage of certain cybersecurity defences and compliance standards, Uber's senior director of technology strategy Kamran Zargahi told The Wall Street Journal.
Zargahi expects the migration to be complete within a few years. "It also means shifting engineers from managing data centres to "areas that make differentiation for our product," he added.
