People Know That Cloud Is Imperative: Srikanth Doranadula, Oracle India

As we eagerly await the arrival of 2023, a lot of uncertainties persist in the tech world. But cloud adoption is expected to be on a positive growth trajectory. BW Businessworld’s Rohit Chintapali got in touch with Srikanth Doranadula (Group Vice President, Technology and Systems for Oracle India) to know more about cloud demand and Oracle’s India business.

Edited Excerpts:

Cost-cutting is happening in companies all over the world. Is cloud spending getting affected? 

We are seeing cloud adoption going up. If you look at the percentage of adoption of cloud, there is still a long way to go. At this point of time, we are definitely seeing the expenditure around cloud going up. But at the same time, there is also optimising and trying to get the maximum benefit out of cloud. People know that cloud is imperative.

What are the big bets for Oracle in India? 

BFSI has been one of the growth engines for us. Telco has been another growth engine for us. At the same time, we are slowly seeing a rapid increase in the public sector spending also. This is happening with the government's push and India's journey on digitalisation. So, we are seeing push in the public sectors clearly. We also see a lot of adoption in startup ecosystem. These three to four verticals continue to be our drivers.

What kind of work is Oracle doing with startups and SMBs in the country? 

We have an ISV partner ecosystem in terms of reaching out to the startups and SMBs. We are working with these partners, who build small applications to take it to the marketplace. They work with us in terms of developing, certifying their applications on our cloud so that they can go on and sell it to the customers. We are also working with them in terms of various channel programs to encourage ISVs to come and join our OCI bandwagon.

Oracle has a lot of competition in cloud internationally. How are you viewing all the competition in India as opposed to the international scene? 

A lot of core applications are still not multi-cloud which means that each customer is going through a different cloud journey. So, there is enough for all of us to do. There are two ways of looking at it, each one of us have a market to capture at the same time. That is why you see interconnectivity of the clouds beginning. Hybrid and multi-cloud are here to stay clearly. From an India perspective, each player will play to their strength. We will play from a database strength. 

What is Oracle's strategy when it comes to hybrid cloud in India? What kind of pitch are you making to the companies, or what kind of business strategy do we have for India?

As Oracle, we are differentiated. Our cloud, be it, public cloud (the OCI), hybrid cloud or multi-cloud – the architectures remain the same. Whatever you deploy, they provide the same tool sets, same automation and lifecycle. That's the advantage we are bringing to the customers table today. If a customer has developed something for the hybrid model, you can still move it to the OCI. We have provided that flexibility to the customer.