Las Vegas,  Cloud major Oracle and banking giant HSBC on Tuesday announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate its digital transformation.

Under the multi-year agreement, HSBC will upgrade and migrate select database systems to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, a cloud platform delivered as a managed infrastructure service at the bank's own data centres.

The deployment will help support and scale the bank's mission-critical systems and services.

"Our strategy is to digitise the bank at scale, so that we can innovate faster for customers, and our collaboration with Oracle is important in advancing this transformation agenda," said Frank McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, HSBC.

"We chose Exadata Cloud@Customer primarily for its ability to offer well known databases, with the benefit of a database-as-a-service platform, giving us the performance and operational agility we need as we continue to grow and diversify our business," McGrath added.

Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer provides a secure, highly-available cloud platform that will enable HSBC to continue to use Oracle databases in support of its critical systems while retaining control of its data governance, thereby meeting data locality and security regulations.

The platform will also enable HSBC to more easily bring cloud automation to manage legacy applications, and easily scale services according to customer and local-market demands.

"We are working closely with HSBC to achieve this balance, enabling it to consolidate critical systems on a secure, scalable on-premises cloud platform and develop cloud-based services faster," said Garrett Ilg, President Japan and Asia Pacific, Oracle.

At its flagship 'CloudWorld' event here, the company also announced several new distributed cloud offerings to meet customers' diverse needs and growing demand for OCI.

New options include Oracle Alloy, Oracle MySQL HeatWave for Microsoft Azure, and plans to open new public cloud regions in Chicago, Serbia, and Mexico.

OCI's distributed cloud gives customers the flexibility needed to access cloud services from anywhere via public, multi cloud, hybrid, and dedicated options.

"Organisations want to move their workloads to the cloud, but are often facing multiple hurdles," said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

"With OCI's distributed cloud, we're able to give our customers the flexibility they need to deploy cloud services wherever they choose -- and we're ultimately changing the way our customers think about the cloud," said Magouyrk.

OCI operates 40 commercial and government regions across 22 countries on five continents.

It has introduced 10 public cloud regions over the past year and has plans to add six commercial regions.