Autonomous Services to Boost Cloud Growth For Oracle

In an exclusive conversation with Dataquest, Ravi Pinto, Director - Product Management, Oracle Cloud Platform, talks about  growth drivers for cloud in India, Oracle's new autonomous cloud offerings and how does it help CIOs. Excerpts:

Q. What are the growth drivers for cloud in India?

Indian companies understand the need to transform into digital-first businesses and are ahead of some of their APAC peers in cloud adoption. The drivers include increasing access to enterprise-grade solutions, the need for CIOs to focus more on accelerating innovation to drive core business growth, and a dynamic business landscape powered by several new technologies. India’s vibrant SMB economy and a growing startup base are contributing to this growth.

Q. Can you share some details about your new autonomous cloud offerings?

At present, it’s estimated that almost 80% of an IT department’s bandwidth in an enterprise is consumed by day-to-day operations, performing mundane tasks - common examples include updating antivirus software, checking for new software patches/updates, database monitoring and tuning and the like. Further, most CIOs are challenged to optimally utilize emerging technologies such as AI/ML, Chatbots or Blockchain for their businesses because their teams are caught up with mundane, operational tasks.

With CEOs looking to their CIOs to accelerate innovation and drive more business impact, CIOs are now looking to break the shackles of this operational gridlock. A new category of cloud services, Oracle’s Autonomous Cloud suite helps CIOs do just that - focus more on innovation and drive more business outcomes, as Oracle’s autonomous cloud services are self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing. Oracle Cloud Platform autonomous services are built with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and ground-breaking machine-learning (ML) algorithms, enabling organizations to lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights. Oracle believes that the future of IT is autonomous cloud, and autonomous goes well-beyond automation as we know it.

Q. Can you please elaborate on why you think CIOs will embrace your autonomous cloud offerings?

Autonomous cloud brings significant benefits in several ways. First and foremost, it helps CIOs reduce their administration costs by up to 80% with complete automation of operations and tuning, while reducing runtime costs by up to 70% by paying only for resources needed at any given time. Secondly, in terms of adoption of new technologies, autonomous cloud enables CIOs to make quick decisions and helps them deploy new applications in minutes versus months. This allows them to save several thousands of dollars and keep pace with more agile, start-up style competitors.

Q. How is autonomous cloud focusing on the security aspect, given how important security is for an organization?

With cyber threats on the rise, security has become one of the most crucial areas of focus for businesses. Three foundational traits of our autonomous cloud suite are the self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing capabilities. The self-securing capability, which empowers you with overall security, spans two aspects: external and internal threats.

On the external front, the self-securing model is constantly on the lookout, prompting immediate remediation action as needed. Most threats occur because people attack through machines, so we need our machines to be more intelligent to resolve the threats. Machines have to play the role of a defender, sans human involvement.

On the internal front, out-of-pattern queries/actions instantly raise a red flag. For instance, if any internal stakeholder or an employee tries to access sensitive data not part of his/her daily routine, the administrator gets an instant alert. In case the said employee persists, then such a mala fide activity is blocked, prompting more disciplinary action against the employee.  

Q. What is the market potential? How do you plan to compete?

With less than 10% of production workloads running in the public cloud, the growth opportunity is immense. Further, cloud is the foundation for most emerging technologies such as AI/ML, IoT and blockchain. It’s therefore natural for cloud adoption to further increase in the coming months.

From our point of view, Oracle is the only complete, enterprise-grade cloud company and we’ve been growing our global cloud business consistently for the last couple of years. We’re witnessing similar growth success in India as well, with more and more organisations of all sizes across industries - from large companies to SMBs, unicorns to niche startups - selecting Oracle Cloud for hyper growth.

On the technology front, we’ve consistency pushed the envelope to offer our customers more value and make them future ready. A recent example is our suite of Autonomous Cloud services, a new category of cloud services, as acknowledged by several analysts and industry observers.

Q. Can you share some recent cloud customer successes?

There are several. Safexpress, a leading logistics company, significantly increased performance efficiencies and transformed its customers’ experience by using Oracle Management Cloud. Safexpress gained visibility into their entire IT infrastructure, and was able to proactively detect problems, such as slow transactions, and was able to manage, resolve them faster.

NCDEX eMarkets wanted to migrate from an on-premises IT environment to a next-generation enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure, with scalability as a key criterion. With Oracle, the migration was easier than imagined, also delivering the same quality experience to their end customers as before.

It took Bajaj Electricals just three weeks to build a pilot chatbot using Oracle Intelligent bots. The customer acknowledged that Oracle’s bot-building machine learning capability easily enables them to design a chatbot to be used for use beyond customer care.