by admin | May 25, 2021 | Banking, Branding, Business, Economy, Finance, Markets, Medium Enterprise, News, Technology
By Krishna SinhaChaudhury,
New Delhi : Cloud major Oracle, which is seeing high demand in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), telecom and manufacturing sectors in India, has witnessed double-digit growth in the country for the past three years, a top company executive has said.
Start-ups and small and medium businesses (SMBs) are fast adopting Oracle’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in the country.
“We are seeing double-digit growth (on an average) in the country. In fact, that’s both in our NetSuite business as well as our enterprise business.
“The India Cloud business is really booming. Overall, the double-digit growth has been there for the last three years in the country, which has been the best-performing region in the Asia-Pacific for us,” Shaakun Khanna, India SaaS GTM Lead, Oracle, told IANS in an interview.
The company competes with major Cloud players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure and provides services such as SaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).
According to Oracle, as a corporation, the firm is on track to become the top SaaS company in the world.
The company offers innovative and proven Cloud suite of SaaS applications that enable customers to transform their business with the latest intelligent technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
“From a perspective of completeness of our enterprise applications, there’s no one who can compare with us. So, that’s pretty much our objective and vision in India as well,” Khanna added.
According to the company, going “autonomous” gave it an edge over rivals in the country.
Larry Ellison, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Oracle, in October unveiled the second generation Oracle Cloud with autonomous capabilities, improved security and upgrades for enterprises at the company’s annual user conference “Oracle Open World 2018” in San Francisco.
According to Khanna, autonomous is probably the biggest thing because, with autonomous, the ability to engage technologies like AI, ML, UI-UX, is there.
“I think the other advantage is our diversity, because if you look at it, we are the only company of our stature in the world that has everything — it’s not just the applications that are ours, the hardware, the infrastructure, the database, everything is Oracle,” Khanna noted.
The Oracle Autonomous Database now has the capability to automatically scan for security threats and apply security updates while running to help prevent cyberattacks and data theft.
“If you look at the way Oracle built its first set of Cloud infrastructure is very similar to how Google built it, how Amazon built it, how Microsoft built it, almost everyone built it and we are doing exactly the same.
“Larry and the other founders who started Oracle — they were working for a CIA project and then they came out and started Oracle. So we understand security from our DNA,” said Mitesh Agarwal, Vice President, Key Accounts, Oracle India.
“Almost all of our competitors have never managed to move an enterprise workload to the Cloud — not a single one of them. They all have peripheral applications that have moved to the Cloud. That’s still only about 5-6 per cent of the workloads in the world,” Agarwal informed.
(Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Emerging Businesses, Markets, Technology
Bengaluru : As Indian enterprises look to embrace Cloud-driven solutions, the thriving developers’ community is increasingly preferring open, container native technologies for rapid application development and deployment.
The container-native platform enables DevOps teams to build, deploy and operate container-based microservices and serverless applications, using open source tools.
As developers understand the need to move fast, build for the Cloud but retain the flexibility to run where the business or workloads require, there is more leaning towards open source based, community driven technology stack to avoid cloud lock-in, the company said in a statement.
The company organised the second edition of its “Oracle Code” event here where developers attended keynotes, technical sessions and hands-on labs experience.
“In the Cloud economy, businesses are always searching for innovative ways to increase their developer velocity and agility to accelerate digital transformation,” said Ravi Pinto, Director-Product Management, Oracle Cloud Platform.
“Developers are increasingly preferring open, cloud-neutral and community-driven container-native software stacks that enable them to avoid cloud lock-in and to run in a true hybrid mode — so they can use the same stack in the Cloud — for that matter on any Cloud — as they run on-premises,” Pinto explained.
“Oracle Code” enables developers get hands-on view into emerging technologies and techniques for modern Cloud development.
According to Oracle, key trends witnessed in the Indian developer ecosystem include conversational user interface, serverless computing, containers and microservices and Blockchain.
“There has never been a better time to grow Java skills for the developer community. Java remains the top choice for companies capable of handling traditional and new styles of programming,” the company said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Sourabh Kulesh,
New Delhi : When it comes to Big Data and Analytics, Indian enterprises are adopting the technologies to improve operations and enhance customer experience at a greater pace than the rest of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries, a senior executive from Cloud major Oracle has said.
When it comes to the Next-Gen trends in the Big Data space, adoption, customer interaction and operational excellence are growing rapidly among Indian enterprises.
“India is the leader in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education; so the companies are well prepared with the staff and the kind of talent needed to leverage Big Data and Analytics. There are a lot of opportunities that the country still needs to explore to make value out of Big Data,” Jeff Olson, Head of Big Data and Analytics, Oracle APAC, told IANS in an interview.
“I see rapid adoption of Cloud in the country. The ability to try new ideas and to give staff and employees opportunities to innovate and use big data insights is a huge trend today,” Olson added.
According to a survey conducted by the market research firm Longitude Research, along with Oracle and chip-maker Intel, the Cloud strategies of 43 per cent of Indian businesses are fully implemented and working.
The survey added that an emerging group of businesses that have 70 per cent or more of their applications in the Cloud are outperforming their competitors globally.
Businesses in India are now looking to capitalise on new and innovative technologies, such as open source, multi-platform capabilities and visual tools in the next year.
Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of IT executives from India felt that automation capabilities were important to the business and a fifth underlined the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) within the organisation, the survey noted.
“The advantages and flexibility with Cloud computing, particularly with Oracle, is very attractive to businesses and the momentum on Cloud is very large,” the executive noted.
According to Olson, ML, AI and Big Data Analytics will become intrinsic to every point in an organisation to make it future-ready.
Oracle is helping enterprises in creating the mindset and helping them develop capabilities to innovate.
According to the company, Indian businesses are now comfortably adopting Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and have realised that these solutions are scalable, agile and secure.
As per market research firm Gartner, SaaS will be the biggest Cloud market and will double to $75 billion by 2020 globally. In India, the SaaS business grew at the rate of 33 per cent (year-on-year) in 2017.
Speaking on the industries that will leverage the power of Big Data Analytics in the future, Olson said enterprises with retail focus and large transaction volumes are more likely to adapt to the situation.
“Telcos, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector, and retail with huge customer-driven analytics focus, along with manufacturing and supply-chain heavy industries, will have a huge opportunity in analytics,” Olson added.
Olson said that Oracle has several customers in the APAC region who have been successful because they delved into the Big Data Analytics space and innovations are coming to them at a rapid pace.
“We are in a phase where things are changing very fast. The ability to change, to adapt, to innovate and to fuel that entrepreneurial spirit into your business has added a lot of extra values to the world. Oracle’s products are now helping businesses to adopt, innovate and drive values,” the executive said.
(Sourabh Kulesh can be contacted at sourabh.k@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, Markets, Startup Basics, Technology
San Francisco : In an effort to support the growing startup community, Cloud major Oracle on Wednesday announced to expand its global startup ecosystem.
The expansion includes the launch of a new virtual-style, non-residential global programme titled “Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem”, the company said in a statement.
“In 2017, we launched eight residential programmes ahead of schedule and attracted almost 4,000 global startups for only 40 programme slots — a clear indication of the tremendous demand,” said Reggie Bradford, Oracle senior vice president, Startup Ecosystem and Accelerator.
“Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem” is designed for startups and venture capital and private equity portfolio companies to enable hyper-growth and scale.
The programme offers mentoring, R and D support, marketing/sales enablement, migration assistance, cloud credits and discounts and access to Oracle’s customer and product ecosystems.
“Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem is a new global programme that allows us to reach more innovators and entrepreneurs, regardless of location, including later-stage scale-up companies who need access to Oracle Cloud solutions and resources,” Bradford added.
Industry veteran and Amazon Web Services (AWS) alum Jason Williamson will lead the “Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem” programme.
“Oracle’s Scaleup programme is aptly timed for the emerging ecosystem of enterprise software and SaaS vendors,” said Sunil Rao, Partner, Business Services, Lightspeed India Partners.
The company also added Austin to the residential “Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator” programme.
With this, “Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator” now has nine locations worldwide — Austin, Bengaluru, Bristol, Mumbai, Delhi, Paris, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Tel Aviv.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Emerging Businesses, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Networking, SMEs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : With a surge in the adoption of Cloud-based services in India, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one area that is growing faster that ever before. According to a top Oracle India executive, this is because businesses — from large to small — have realised that SaaS solutions are scalable, agile and secure.
SaaS will be the biggest Cloud market and will double to $75 billion by 2020 globally, says Gartner. In India, the SaaS business grew at the rate of 33 per cent (year-on-year) in 2017.
“We believe that SaaS will actually meet burgeoning customer expectations in India as well as globally. We have witnessed the shift in customer mindset, primarily because of the benefits that some of the early starters have managed to achieve by implementing and rolling out SaaS-based applications,” Prasad Rai, Vice President – Applications at Oracle, told IANS.
“Initially, customers used to have apprehensions about SaaS solutions, but today organisations across sectors are open to considering business applications to meet their expectations,” Rai added.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the SaaS segment holds nearly 69 per cent of overall Public Cloud market share globally.
From the largest firms to start-ups, everyone is looking at Cloud or at least at the Cloud-first approach.
“There are two reasons for that. One is that organisations can get their applications up and running much faster than in the past; and second is that businesses have realised that SaaS solutions are scalable, agile, extremely secure and are available all the time,” Rai noted.
SaaS is perhaps a decade-old market in India and initially catered to overseas clients before Indian enterprises realised the need to adopt Cloud-based services.
“We had Cloud-based solutions about 10 years ago. Over these years, SaaS solutions have matured and early adopters have started witnessing the benefits. This has resulted in more and more companies across the spectrum joining the journey towards the Cloud,” Rai emphasised.
“If you look at the R&D spend of several major software original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the world, you will see that a majority of their R&D spend now is focused on the Cloud,” he added.
Oracle registered six per cent revenue growth ($9.6 billion) for the second quarter of fiscal 2017-2018 and Cloud SaaS revenues were up 55 per cent to $1.1 billion.
In comparison, Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) plus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues were up 21 per cent to $396 million. Total Cloud revenues were up 44 per cent to $1.5 billion.
“At Oracle, we firmly believe that SaaS applications deliver the best value to our customers. Our experts spend time with the customers to take them through various levels of security that we build into the SaaS solutions at our data centres so that the customer’s data is secure and is accessible or visible to the customer only,” Rai explained.
Not even the people working at Oracle data centres have access to the customer’s data, he added.
Oracle has the entire suite of SaaS solutions, starting from traditional ERP to Fusion ERP till HCM and CRM applications.
“We have moved to an almost completely Cloud-based approach in delivering the applications. We have thousands of SaaS customers in India and more and more customers are looking at adopting these solutions,” Rai said.
Start-ups are Cloud-native organisations and do not have any preference for on-premise solutions.
“For example, fashion e-commerce marketplace Myntra has deployed our service Cloud and enterprise performance management applications,” Rai told IANS.
IT company Genpact has deployed Oracle’s human capital management and enterprise management solutions. In the start-up space, OYO Rooms has rolled out Oracle Fusion HCM to manage their entire human capital.
“Similarly, ASK Group and Airtel have deployed our SaaS-based applications,” Rai said.
In the enterprise space in India, Oracle has witnessed a rapid uptake in ITeS, hospitality, health care or any of IT services-based industries.
“Now we are seeing upswing in manufacturing organisations as they need to be able to take business decisions in lesser time and to have an agile IT infrastructure,” the Oracle executive noted.
Oracle is also embedding Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its applications.
“SaaS solutions have democratised the market, where organisations of every size can avail the best in world Cloud applications,” Rai said.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
