Oracle India has been making aggressive moves to grow its customers experience in Cloud. The company is pushing enterprises to evolve its current IT infrastructure (from standalone, consolidated and optimized) to become more “cloud-like” and consume “IT-as-a-Service” more effectively. In an email interaction to Channeltimes, Niraj Kaushik, Vice President, Applications Business, Oracle India shared Oracle’s cloud offerings ahead of Oracle annual cloud summit- CloudWorld in Mumbai.
Excerpts..
CT: Oracle India has been making getting momentum in Cloud recently and there are plans to expand the cloud team. Could you explain the overall Oracle’s roadmap in Cloud?
Kaushik: Cloud computing is driving a significant part of Oracle’s product development plans – from enterprise applications to middleware, databases, servers and storage devices, as well as cloud management systems. Oracle offers technology that enables organizations to build private clouds, leverage public clouds and provide cloud services to others. Oracle also offers a broad set of horizontal and industry applications that run in a shared services private cloud model as well as a public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud model. Oracle’s long history of technology innovation along with approximately seven years of relentless engineering and key strategic acquisitions enabled the organization to recently launch the most comprehensive cloud offerings in the world.
Oracle’s overall roadmap is to provide the industry’s most complete, open and integrated set of products from applications to disk. For cloud computing, Oracle’s strategy is…
Ensure that cloud computing is fully enterprise grade – Oracle provides enterprise grade technology for high performance, reliability, scalability, availability, security and portability/interoperability (based on standards). Enterprises demand these characteristics before moving important workloads to a public or private cloud.
Support both public and private clouds to give customer choice –Organizations are adopting different deployment models for cloud computing for different applications at different rates of speed. Oracle supports public clouds as well as on premise private clouds
Deliver most complete PaaS and IaaS product offerings – Oracle provides the most complete portfolio of software and hardware products to enable organizations to build, deploy and manage public and private PaaS and IaaS. A key element of Oracle’s strategy is to offer the Oracle PaaS Platform.
Deliver the most comprehensive SaaS offering – Oracle offers a very broad portfolio of horizontal and industry cloud applications covering CRM, Social, HCM, ERP and EPM BI products on the cloud.
CT: What are the areas in Cloud that Oracle is banking on?
Kaushik: Oracle today hosts and manages the world’s most comprehensive cloud, powering a combination of public and private clouds on behalf of thousands of Oracle customers and more than 5 million users. Oracle generates about $1 billion annual revenue from Web-based software solutions and more than 25 million users rely on Oracle Cloud every day. Oracle Cloud is a strategic offering within Oracle’s comprehensive cloud services portfolio.
Oracle remains poised in the position to address needs for extreme performance and mission-critical computing, so that companies can reap the maximum ROI out of their IT investments. We remain committed to customers at different stages of IT adoption. We believe that enterprises will evolve their current IT infrastructure (from standalone, consolidated and optimized) to become more “cloud-like” and consume “IT-as-a-Service” more effectively.
Most of the ecommerce companies in India are Oracle Cloud customers. Some of the best and largest customers in the professional services, financial services, manufacturing, telecom and healthcare industries are using Oracle’s cloud offerings today.. We will continue to see a greater surge in cloud adoption in the above industries going forward.
Core HCM, talent management, recruiting, marketing, sales, social sentiment monitoring and engagement, and customer service are the areas that are seeing the greatest cloud adoption and Oracle is banking on these applications and core areas to drive its cloud business for the next few years.
“IT-as-a-Service” will see IT departments become a better internal service provider to the lines of business, business units and departments. IT will become more agile and responsive to business needs, give higher service quality in terms of latency & availability, offer lower costs and maintain higher IT resource utilization.
CT: How Oracle is expanding cloud in the Indian market?
Kaushik: We believe that enterprises are on a journey to cloud computing. Most will evolve their current IT infrastructure to become more “cloud-like” – to become a better internal service provider to the lines of business, BUs, departments – to provide greater agility and responsiveness to business needs, higher quality of service in terms of latency & availability, and lower costs and higher utilization. This evolution will take time. Not only is the available technology evolving and advancing, but enterprises are also working on the new policies and processes needed. In many cases, the technical building blocks for cloud computing are available in advance of enterprise readiness, so we think that enterprises will evolve at different rates.
As a result of the momentum and interest that we have seen in the cloud market in the country, we are having the third CloudWorld in India this year. It is a great platform for Oracle global as well as Indian executives, partners and customers to come together and share best practices, experiences as well as insights on cloud. In addition to this, Oracle executives also discuss the growth and share the strategy in India.
CT: Do you see a substantial shift towards the cloud by organizations in India?
Kaushik: Cloud has been seeing a lot of demand across industries. Industries like telecom, BFSI, retail, education, healthcare and government are increasingly turning to the cloud to simplify IT. The demand for public cloud has recently shown an increase in the mobile and broadband sectors; pharmacy, manufacturing, e-commerce, retail and travel were the early adopters of public cloud. These sectors involve both the SMBs as well as larger enterprises.
CT: Can you share some examples of Oracle’s cloud solutions?
Kaushik: Oracle has seen success in cloud across sectors especially in the ecommerce and online segment where customer experience is critical. One of the most significant success stories for Oracle has been, MakeMyTrip’s unified approach in cloud to increases customer loyalty and business efficiencies. Yet another accomplishment for Oracle is the Bigtree Entertainment’s implementation of a Centralized Contact Database. This helped Bigtree Entertainment in accelerating customer care response time to e-mail and phone queries about ticketing by 30%.