Oracle launches new cloud-based services for targeting higher education space in India

The higher education system in India is facing an unprecedented transformation, driven by economic and demographic change. Experts believe by 2020, India will be the third largest economy. Currently, more than 50 percent of India’s population is under 25 years old. But as opposed to developed countries, where the percentage of skilled workforce is between 60 percent and 90 percent of the total workforce, India records a low 5 percent of workforce (20 to 25 years) with formal vocational skills. There is a pressing need for accelerated reform in the higher education ecosystem to equip India’s youth with skillsets that enhance their employability in a digital economy.

Oracle has introduced three Cloud Platform Services for higher education institutes to support this endeavor. The offerings - Oracle Document Cloud Service, Oracle Database Cloud Service, and Oracle Java Cloud Service are designed to meet the industry’s demand for a cloud-ready workforce. They will address the need of an always plugged-in generation of millennial wanting to access these services anytime, anywhere and on any-device. The solution will help students and faculty to collaborate on projects, across disparate campuses and geographies. Additionally, they will provide an easy, secure, and agile environment for the incubation of student start-ups at campuses by enabling easy access to compute resources for application development.

Oracle said that the Cloud Platform Services will enable India’s higher education institutes to minimize the financial burden of deploying new technologies for curriculum updates; ensure agility to develop and deploy complex solutions for academic projects as per curriculum; realize a drastic reduction in capital expenditure (owing to reduced IT infrastructure and manpower requirement) and ensure flexibility to dynamically scale services to address fluctuating demands (without any additional investment in infrastructure)

Oracle Cloud Platform Services to Power Modern Campuses
Oracle Cloud Platform Services will be useful for students who study IT in some form or other in their curriculum, such as mechanical or computer science or electronic fields of engineering. These services can be accessed by all students—day scholars or residential students staying in college hostels. These cloud services can be accessed by students via the internet or their internet dongle connections—anytime, anywhere, on any device. For the university, these solutions offer complete audit logs for the administration to monitor access of students based on IP.

Oracle Document Cloud Service enables sharing of files between staff and students or between project teams (e.g., at the time of third year and final year project submissions). The documents can be accessed on mobile or on desktop/laptop; online or offline. Since access to documents are rule-based, only appropriate faculty or students gain access to documents, depending on sensitivity of information included. The documents can be customized with the college logo to maintain legitimacy.

Oracle Database Cloud Service allows students full access to features and operations that are available with an already familiar Oracle Database, without the hassle of managing its underlying infrastructure. Students can perform database management and development operations in a cloud model. They will also gain access to a suite of simplified tools for backup and recovery commands, software upgrades and patching, and to spin up or tear down additional database instances. This will ultimately grow their skills on Oracle Database, India’s most preferred relational database that powers a majority of industries in the private and public sectors.

Oracle Java Cloud Service provides students with an environment to build, deploy, and manage Java applications. Java continues to be the most popular programming language among developers<4>. With Oracle Java Cloud Service, students can rapidly provision an application environment (conducive to incubate student start-ups) in the cloud. This provisioning ensures authentication and authorization to instances, so students do not have to worry about other users gaining access to their environment in the cloud. This service is enterprise-class, quick and easy, portable, and secure.

“Today’s higher education institutions across the private and public sectors face unique challenges, one of which includes devising appropriate curriculum to help develop an industry ready workforce. The millennial generation is far advanced in their IT consumption and work collaboratively with their teachers and fellow students. Having served some of the globally renowned universities, Oracle wants to ensure that universities in India have access to the most modern technologies. We want to enable those universities and their students to be better prepared for tomorrow. We believe cloud has a major role to play here,” said Mitesh Agarwal, CTO and vice president, Sales Consulting, Oracle India.