Dive Brief:

• Don Johnson, who joined Oracle in 2014, is now leading Oracle’s public cloud services, Fortune reports. Formerly a senior engineer at Amazon Web Services, Johnson’s new title is now senior vice president of cloud at Oracle.

• Johnson is replacing Peter Magnusson who recently left the company. Three years ago, Magnusson joined Oracle to help the company ramp up its cloud efforts and was seen as a major recruit, having previously worked in application development and deployment at Google. Oracle did not comment on the leadership changes.

• The leadership changes come as Oracle is doubling down on its cloud efforts, looking to catch up with market leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. 

Dive Insight:

Oracle appears to be doubling its effort in the cloud market as it seeks to better compete in the highly lucrative cloud arena currently led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and IBM. The leadership change may be an effort to push those efforts in a new direction.

Last week, Oracle said plans to launch three new cloud services regions — in Reston, Virginia; London, UK; and Turkey — in the next six months, having doubled the regional presence of its cloud platform over the last two years.

But the company has a long way to go to catch up with AWS and Microsoft. For the quarter ended Nov. 30, 2016, Oracle reported revenue of $878 million from Software as a Service and Platform as a Service. By contrast, AWS reported third-quarter revenue of $3.2 billion in October.

Sales of Oracle’s on-prem software and hardware services have suffered as more businesses move to the cloud. Earlier this week, news emerged that Oracle plans to lay off about 450 employees in its Santa Clara, CA hardware systems division. As those sales fall, it appears Oracle is seeing a more profitable future in the cloud.