Oracle Cloud Gets Bigger In India

India is the silver lining in Oracle’s cloud. The company intends to grow 10 fold in India by 2020 driven by enormous opportunities in cloud. Oracle CEO Safra Catz, at the company’s recently-concluded flagship event OpenWorld, said, “For us, it is the single largest growth potential country.”

India now represents the tech giant’s second largest employee base outside of the US, with nearly 40,000 employees and 2,000 current job openings.

Oracle’s total cloud revenue was nearly $1 billion in Q1 FY17. Its cloud business in India has been growing at 100 per cent on a quarterly basis, says Shailender Kumar, managing director of Oracle India. “Apart from flexibility, cost and agility, innovation and time-to-market are driving cloud in India,” he says, adding that the cloud is helping customers reduce the time taken between inception and execution of an idea and thereby enabling quicker returns on investment.

While traditionally, Oracle has been an enterprise-focussed company, through cloud it is now reaching out to the largely-untapped small and mid-market customers. “About 50 per cent of our business today is coming from customers we have never done business with in the past,” says Kumar. Ola, Makemytrip, Jabong, PVR Cinemas, and Bookmyshow are some of Oracle’s customers in the small- and mid-segment.

Oracle’s ‘Cloud at Customer’ suite of offerings — recently launched in India — has received significant traction in the market. Kumar says, ‘Cloud at Customer’ is already being implemented by two large customers in India. It is a unique public cloud offering that provides chief information officers with the option of running their critical application from within their company’s firewall.

As far as their cloud strategy in India is concerned, Oracle started with software-as-a-service (SaaS) three years ago, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) two years ago, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) was introduced just six months ago. But make no mistake, Oracle is witnessing maximum traction from the IaaS stack and believes that it is best positioned to lead in this space as it has the complete suite of offerings. “There is not much customer stickiness in IaaS unless you have the complete suite,” says Kumar.

No doubt, Oracle’s ability to offer a complete suite versus point solutions is one of its biggest strengths over competition, but its claims of being a market leader is up for debate. Having said that, the company’s focus and commitment towards building an integrated cloud, both globally and in India, is worth taking note of.