Rewiring The DNA Of An Organisation
Oiracle India has had a dream run for the last three years, with team India winning the ‘best performing region’ within Oracle APAC. From helping several Indian organisations to modernise and develop a digital-first mind-set, to enabling an intuitive, delightful experience to their end consumers; from helping our partners expand and acquire new cloud capabilities to nearly doubling our overall customer base (around 15,000 as on date) — the journey continues to be every bit exciting. It has also been one of my biggest career challenges, because rewiring an organisation’s DNA — to create a modern, agile workforce — is anything but easy.
Led by the visionary Larry Ellison, Oracle has always been ahead of its time. Even before the term “digital transformation” became mainstream, internally, we decided to democratise technology for businesses to keep pace with the cloud economy. For an organisation as big as Oracle (presence in 175 countries, 137,000 employees overall — you get the drift), this needed a mind-set shift — both individually and collectively. At a country level, we had a two-pronged focus: first, get our teams behind the idea to align with the global direction, fast; and second, closely collaborate with customers (different customers have different needs) to help them embark on a journey of digital transformation sooner rather than later.
We had to transform internally — starting with helping our teams understand how cloud can help build a modern, digital India, to why our customers need to accelerate their move to the cloud — given the changing consumer behaviour (rise of the digitally-savvy, millennial end consumer base). We started deploying Oracle cloud solutions for internal consumption, before taking them to customers with our learnings and improved services. In parallel, we undertook large scale training programmes to empower our sales teams with a cloud-first mind-set. We brought together a modern, world-class sales workforce hailing from diverse backgrounds (including non-IT) and age groups (millennials).
We equipped them with modern, digital sales tools and processes, including “smart walls” (to remotely deliver real-time demos to customers on the move), “social listening hubs” (to provide sales teams with customer intelligence and information on trends, real time), “one-click contracts” to accelerate customer buying experience, among others.
For enterprise customers, this greatly improved their ease of doing business with us, cutting down procurement (and therefore deployment) time drastically to days (hours or even minutes in some cases) instead of months and start realising business benefits faster than imagined.
We put together two key teams: industry specialist innovation advisors (domain experts) and customer success specialists (to help customers draw maximum benefits from their Oracle Cloud services).
To help Indian SMBs dream bigger and scale globally with Oracle Cloud, we tweaked our go-to-market strategy, starting with the launch of Oracle Digital Hub in Bengaluru (first such modern hub in APAC). This hub comes with state-of-the-art collaboration technology — including high end multimedia/social tools. Equipped with virtual meeting labs, smart screens, interactive meeting technology and modern office space to foster increased collaboration, the hub enables an immersive employee and customer experience, aptly blending the physical and digital worlds.
Every satisfied customer is an inspiration, and their success is our success. It is a matter of great pride that we are a catalyst for digital transformation for some of the largest, oldest, iconic brands: State Bank of India, Hindalco Industries, Adani Group, Indian Oil, to name just a few.
As Socrates said, “The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.” And that’s exactly what team Oracle India did.
