Oracle India Bets Big on Cloud

In an attempt to catch up in the cloud race, Oracle has geared up to showcase its prowess once again through its annual cloud show Oracle CloudWorld which is happening in Mumbai in its third year. Oracle has enhanced its cloud focus significantly in India, as is visible from its decision to add 300 marketing and sales people to push its cloud strategy in India.

Cloud market in India has witnessed a drastic growth in the past few years. According to Zinnov study, the total cloud market in India will grow at 45% CAGR to $14.8 billion in 2020. The study estimates that the private cloud market is expected to increase to $ 7.4-7.6 billion in 2020 while the public cloud market too would grow to almost an equivalent size at $7 -7.4 billion in 2020.

Shailender Kumar - Managing Director, Oracle India

“We would like to not just maintain the momentum that we are already observing but heavily grow the cloud business in India. Customers’ confidence in us and our relevance to them has never been more compelling,” says Shailender Kumar - Managing Director, Oracle India. The company claims to focus on helping customers resolve their IT complexities by providing them with solutions that are easy to install, use and ultimately drive improved business efficiencies across all functions – be it sales or marketing or HR, etc.

Oracle’s heavy push to cloud has also begun to reflect in its global revenues which grew 30% to $327 million (Rs 2,038 crore) in the third quarter ended February 28, 2015. “With modern marketing, customer experience, HCM, database etc. all available on cloud now, along with platform-as-a-service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions, Oracle is the only vendor offering the complete stack when it comes to cloud solutions. We are hiring more than 200 sales professionals to accelerate and ramp up our cloud business in the country.This comes on the heels of strong quarterly earnings driven by cloud revenue,” further adds Kumar.

It is CloudWorld

Oracle has also witnessed robust growth for its cloud business in India, claims the company. Its CloudWorld in India has played a key role in taking company’s cloud strategy forward to customers. At CloudWorld, the company invites CXOs from across the industries so that it can properly communicate benefits of its wide range of solutions to them. “The Oracle CloudWorld is an invite-only event aimed at CXOs and senior executives to help them understand how best to leverage disruptive technologies to drive transformational change. Thought leaders from Oracle and other leading organizations will share insights on why innovation within an organization begins with cloud,” says Kumar.

According to the company, attendees will experience targeted content streams featuring fast-paced sessions and insightful keynotes, real-world case studies, and hands-on demos as well as in depth- tracks. For Oracle, the aim is to be a partner to our customers in their journey to becoming a modern business that can adapt to changes on a real-time basis through a modern cloud.

Modern Business in the Cloud

Niraj Kaushik, Vice President – Applications, Oracle India

Oracle has given the CloudWorld a tagline ‘Modern Business in the Cloud’ with an aim to target the large enterprises for its cloud solutions. “The Oracle Cloud is designed to address precisely these challenges. We have ‘consumerised’ more than 600 plus applications in the cloud. A business should be able to implement functionality out of the box and go live in a matter of weeks, compared to the months and years in the traditional on-premise way,” says Niraj Kaushik, Vice President – Applications, Oracle India.

Kaushik further underlines that Oracle has built in contextual analytics, such as attrition analysis for HR, or pipeline analysis for Sales, that provide relevant data when needed. It incorporates social interaction within the context, e.g. a manager chatting with his employee to check prior to approving an expense, or a sales person chatting with a peer to get information about winning an opportunity. Oracle claims that mobility is a key component of this. Kaushik further reveals that hundreds of customers are using the Oracle Cloud in India to build their pipe, manage projects better, hire people and provide better customer service.

Transformational through cloud

While cloud has already gone deeper in India and many large enterprises have begun to use it to many of their business functions, the cloud market in India is gaining momentum because of the benefits that offers. “Today, continual business transformation is crucial for companies to stay ahead of emerging players and maintain a competitive edge. From bringing new offerings to market to deploying IT systems to major capital expenditures, business transformation can take countless forms,” further adds Kaushik.

Many large institutions, however, are struggling with their transformation efforts. By evolving key IT and development processes and moving them to the cloud, businesses can reduce complexity and innovate faster than ever. “At Oracle, we have been part of this gradual shift in the way organizations are adopting these technologies and shown how the cloud approach to using technology can allow them to become far more competitive in the global marketplace,” concludes Kaushik.