Oracle (News - Alert) will hire over 1,700 employees in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, according to media reports.

This works out to an 8 percent increase in employees in these regions from the current numbers. The company is adding the new workers after finding that it has business growth in the regions. In addition, Oracle is projecting $11.5 billion in revenue from the EMEA region during 2011, which would be a 30 percent increase from 2010.

“The end-to-end hardware + software solutions approach is proving hugely popular with customers and the resulting growth presents us with an opportunity to create more jobs across the region,” Alan Hartwell, Oracle UK technology solutions vice president, said in a statement quoted by Forbes.com.

Database business has been doing well at the company, too.

“In FY11, Oracle’s database business experienced its fastest growth in a decade,” added Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (News - Alert) in a recent company statement. “Over the past few years we added features to the Oracle database for both cloud computing and in-memory databases that led to increased database sales this past year.”

In addition, Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz said that during the fourth quarter Oracle saw a 19 percent new software license growth rate.

“This strong organic growth combined with continuously improving operational efficiencies enabled us to deliver a 48 percent operating margin in the quarter. As our results reflect, we clearly exceeded even our own high expectations for Sun’s business,” Catz said.

Also, the Exadata and Exalogic systems contributed to fourth-quarter growth, Oracle President Mark Hurd (News - Alert) said.

In other recent company news, TMCnet reported that Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire InQuira (News - Alert), which provides service knowledge management software that supports Web self-service and agent-assisted service. InQuira is privately held and has over 85 “blue-chip customers,” TMCnet adds.

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