The Indian businesses have increased their spending for adopting digital tools to speed up their digital transformation journey. The changing business environment in this digital era forcing the businesses to have a resilient IT infrastructure to move quickly. Cloud technology is one of such imperative tools for organizations that help them increase data management capabilities. In addition, new advancements in the cloud space alluring organizations to leverage the benefits of cloud. Oracle is efficiently meeting the growing need of organizations with its cloud offerings. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal held an exclusive chat with Srikanth Doranadula, Vice President - Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India. Mr. Srikanth spoke about the digital wave, cloud adoption, business growth and their plans to empower the organizations in fast moving digital world. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: How do you see the Cloud adoption among Indian organisation? How did these companies benefited from such deployment?
Srikanth: India has witnessed a massive uptick in cloud adoption with forward looking organisations understanding its importance towards achieving their goals. The hike in cloud acceptance is not limited to one sector and is spread across public sector organisations, SMBs to bigger organisations and other highly regulated businesses. Enterprises realise the merit that cloud holds and have leveraged benefits including business agility along with continuity and better innovation at lower costs. The last few years have been key in establishing the fact that superior cloud economics and a well integrated cloud approach makes the recipe for a successful enterprise. IDC’s report states that the overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2025. This massive number supports India’s quick move towards accepting cloud as the foundation of every business. As organisations become cloud native, they will also be able to leverage the benefits of multicloud and hybrid cloud in order to craft better overall cloud strategy for maximum returns. A number of Oracle’s enterprise customers are already moving towards well thought over hybrid cloud strategy to better scale and leverage the benefits of public cloud.
Rajeev: How does Oracle offer best Hybrid Cloud solutions to Indian organisations? What all features or qualities do make your solutions best as compared to players who are playing into the same domain?
Srikanth: At Oracle, we believe it is our responsibility to assist our customers completely in their hybrid cloud journey as enterprises seek more innovative ways to ensure better results. Given that our hybrid cloud strategy is extremely customer focussed, it aims at offering the best-in-class performance that Oracle is known for. We also understand the hesitance that some customers might have when moving to a new environment therefore we have developed a portfolio which allows the customers to take their own pace and identify their data residency and other compliance requirements.
We offer Oracle dedicated region cloud@customer which is also one of our primary offerings and with this, customers wanting data residency can have Oracle’s modern offerings within their own data centers. We don’t compromise on security, performance or any other parameter that any other customer would get in our public cloud regions. Beyond this, we also cater to customers who may need to run cloud workloads in remote locations and for that we offer Roving Edge Devices.
In addition to this, our ExadataCloud@Customer offers high performance data management capabilities to the customers within their own datacenter. These databases remain operational even when disconnected from cloud.
Rajeev: How Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is better than X8M?
Srikanth: Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure is aimed towards allowing organisations to have better performance, security and lower costs. With Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, we are continuing this trend by taking it a notch higher than X8M. Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M offers up to 8064 database server vCPUs, which are 2.5 times more than X8M. In addition to this, customers also get 28% more uncompressed database capacity. With Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M on OCI, analytics workloads are also accelerated in the cloud with 80% faster scan rates of up to 2.88 TB/s.
Rajeev: Please brief about Oracle’s 2022 growth strategy for Indian market. What are your growth / revenue target for this market?
Srikanth: As we see cloud is growing and it has become an imperative for customers. Our endeavour from a strategy perspective is to help and work with more and more customers to simplify their cloud transformation journey across all segments.
Depending on the kind of workloads, we are excited to offer deployment choices to our customers. Either a DRCC, full scale cloud with all available services deployed for customer, OCI -public cloud option, an ExaCC which is same proven Exadata deployed behind the customer’s firewall allowing them to ensure data sovereignty. A good headstart for us is that a lot of customers have adopted the Exa as a platform, be it on - premise, hybrid or the public cloud, which makes their transformation journey easier, since it frees them of any deployment challenges especially in their movement to the cloud. We are looking at a very healthy growth even this year considering that the cloud services market is set to grow to 9.5 BN USD by 2025.
Rajeev: How do you sell these solutions in India? Please brief about your channel network program and your current partner strength.
Srikanth: Oracle’s primary objective is always customer success and for that we highly rely on our extremely well established partner network. We always say and truly believe that our partners are an extension of us. Our partners have become an imperative for us especially when technological acceptance is rising within enterprises and their importance is reflected in the fact that our partners account for 80% of all Oracle transactions at Asia Pacific region.
Our partner led approach required us to help them develop an understanding of cloud and its many capabilities. Our Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is a key source for us to enable our partners to achieve desired customer outcomes. Customer requirements are ever evolving and OPN is an imperative for us to help partners align themselves. This has resulted in reduced costs, scalability and reliability for our customers.
Rajeev: How do you take care of post-sale support for your loyal customers?
Srikanth: Being a customer-centric organisation, post sales is an integral part of our customer support offerings. We strongly believe that an effective partnership doesn’t end at selling the product, especially in cloud computing. Oracle Support offers effective post sale support for any Oracle environment whether it is on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid cloud. We offer end-to-end support whenever required by the customer.
Oracle Premier Support for Software helps maintain products as well as implement new software functionality. It also helps optimize performance for the customers. Oracle Premier Support for Systems is also available where essential services and resource are provided and it helps businesses maintain the availability of systems. Oracle Support delivers end-to-end support to the customer on their journey to the cloud. We offer 24/7 technical assistance from Oracle experts, priority service request handling and remote diagnostics. We also offer the latest software patches and supportability enhancements. Oracle’s support portal also provides the customers with knowledge, community and best practices to further enhance their cloud experience.
