Digital transformation has been a key word for a couple years now and it has become essential for all businesses. Organizations of different sizes in different sectors are adopting new ways to digitize their business and move their operations to the cloud to increase productivity. Cloud solution providers see huge business opportunities in India as they seek to meet the ever-increasing demand. Oracle is helping businesses run their workloads faster and more securely at lower costs. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminals recently spoke to Palanivel Saravanan, Cloud Engineering Leader, Oracle India Pvt Ltd. Palanivel talks about the growing cloud adoption, the changing digital landscape, their cloud offerings and more. Read the excerpt below:
Rajeev: How do you see the growing cloud adoption across India? How do you look at the opportunities in the cloud market in FY 2022-23?
Palanivel: Digital transformation has been at the core of every business in the last few years. Every organisation - large or small - has shifted focus to increase their digital capabilities to sustain in the ever-changing environment. On this transformational course, most successful organisations realised the importance of cloud and embarked on their cloud computing journey. IDC’s recent report is a testimony to this where they have predicted that in 2022, shared cloud infrastructure spending is expected to grow 25.5 per cent (on-year) to total $64.5 billion while spending on dedicated cloud infrastructure is expected to grow 13.1 per cent to reach $25.4 billion in 2022. From an Indian perspective too, Gartner predicts that end-user spending on public cloud services in will total $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.6% from 2021. With such whopping numbers predicted, cloud is going to be the base for every successful organisation to be built in the country.
Cloud market has endless opportunities ahead of it. Cloud born organisations will highly rely on hybrid and multi cloud environment to ensure scalability. Also, AI and ML have already become the key technologies for many organisations and have shown results in innovation and over all profitability. With this the relevance of cloud and applications with built in AI and ML capabilities will shine through. Also, as data becomes the primary source of innovation in every organisation, cloud will play a pivotal role in navigating through the huge amount of data.
Rajeev: Please tell about the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure capabilities? How would these new capabilities help your customers to run their workloads faster?
Palanivel: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) recently came up with 11 new compute, networking and storage services and capabilities with an aim to enable customers to run their workloads faster and more securely at lower costs. Through this, we are offering customers flexible core infrastructure services. Along with that, we also want to help in optimizing resources to application requirement and ultimately assist them in scaling.
This was especially required in a time when globally cloud acceptance is higher and is increasing by the day. We also aim to do away with the misconception that organisations have to re-write their applications for the cloud considering no re-write of the applications is required because of OCI’s Kubernetes compatibility. Additionally, with this new announcement, companies can now build cloud native apps on OCI with support for open, standards-based Kubernetes.
This also allows AI along with high-performance computing customers to build on cloud some of the fastest computing clusters. These new compute, networking and storage services and capabilities will ultimately help save costs and deliver faster innovation for customers. Users can also maximise total cost of ownership from their workloads with features like flexible memory, sub-core burstable CPU and preemptible instances. OCI networking will allow customers to connect securely to OCI’s virtual cloud network and create isolated, secure environment for their workloads. With OCI storage, customers will have high performance and low-cost cloud storage options through object, file, block and archive storage.
In addition to the above, Oracle MySQL HeatWave now supports in-database machine learning (ML). This is added to the previously available transaction processing and analytics. Through this, we aim to remove the need to move data or the model to an ML tool or service by fully automating the ML lifecycle and store all trained models inside MySQL database. Our customers who have had the opportunity to leverage the ML capabilities of Oracle MySQL HeatWave found it very beneficial with better speed and security.
Rajeev: How has been the growth for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in India?
Palanivel: We have been growing exceptionally both in India and globally. In 1990s, we were amongst the first few international technology companies to enter India and today India is our fastest growing markets as we constantly come up with ways to engage with our customers. We have provided solutions that has made us the preferred cloud provider in the country’s most important sectors. Both our cloud regions in India (Mumbai and Hyderabad) are MeitY empanelled and placed across different seismic zones. This has made it possible for public sector organisations to leverage our cloud services in a better manner. As a testimony of our commitment to India, we recently expanded our cloud region in Mumbai with Airtel Nxtra. Our comprehensive services have resonated very well with the customers and currently we serve more than 15,000 customers across various sectors in India that are large enterprises and SMBs. Our partnership with both public and private sector is in itself displays the trust that the country has put in us. We in turn try to provide the best quality, superior cloud economics and end-to-end support to our customers. As India gradually increases its cloud acceptance, we hope to be the partner for companies on this path and offer them resilience, cost benefits and efficiency.
Rajeev: What kind of cloud strategy should enterprises adopt to scale faster and better in a dynamically changing digital landscape?
Palanivel: Making the right cloud choice can be an extremely difficult task especially in the last few years considering how dynamic the environment has become. However, in this cloud-first world, enterprise must aim to become cloud smart and look beyond a single cloud infrastructure provider for all applications. CIOs must seek to tap into strengths of various cloud providers and then pick a blend that suits them best. Companies today are accepting this multi cloud environment to bring overall efficiency, speed and cost effectiveness. This also prevents vendor lock in which can be extremely expensive in some cases. However, CIOs must focus on deliberately picking the right providers with the right capabilities to ensure smooth scalability. Enterprises can also leverage hybrid cloud environment which can allow less complexities and do away with time consuming tasks such as legacy system modernization, higher capital expenditure, moving beyond core capabilities etc. We have witnessed this trend within Oracle as well where our enterprise customers are leveraging hybrid cloud for better scalability.
Rajeev: How does your comprehensive hybrid cloud portfolio provide enterprises with more flexibility and control over their cloud deployments?
Palanivel: We truly believe in supporting our customers end-to-end in their digital transformation journey. We understand that the customers want flexibility, high performance and security therefore we made sure that our hybrid cloud portfolio helps the customers achieve all that.
Our hybrid cloud offerings include Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure which aims to bring core infrastructure services to the edge with Roving Edge Devices (REDs) which are ruggedized, portable, scalable server nodes. This helps the customers to run cloud workloads even in the remotest locations. We also have Oracle dedicated region cloud@customers where we offer the customer capabilities of a public cloud region but inside their premises. Customers get APIs, industry leading SLAs, price benefits and security that is synonymous to our public cloud region. We also offer OCI’s dedicated cloud-native VMware based environment called Oracle Cloud VMware solution. This has helped customers gain scalability with better control over their processes. Also, Oracle’s Exadata Cloud@Customer is aimed at assisting customers who require high performance data management within their own data centers. Through this, the customers enjoy security and benefits that Oracle offers where keeping their data residency requirements fulfilled.
