In 2023, the Austin, Texas-headquartered Oracle Corporation celebrated its 30th year in India. The technology giant, specialising in business software, has undergone one of the industry’s most significant transformations, expanding from offering databases to encompassing software development, hardware, and cloud services. Globally, the $50-billion major has defied growth trends to become the world’s fastest-growing major cloud provider, with a cloud growth rate of 45 per cent. During the fiscal year 2023, its total revenues increased by 18 per cent to $50 billion, while cloud services and licence support revenues rose by 17 per cent to $35.3 billion.
In January 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, valued at more than $7 billion, a move that transformed Oracle from a solely software company to a manufacturer of both software and hardware. The acquisition faced delays for several months due to concerns raised by the European Commission regarding MySQL but was ultimately unconditionally approved.
Today, Oracle, listed on the NYSE, designs, manufactures, and sells both software (including databases and middleware applications) and hardware products, along with complementary services such as financing, training, consulting, and hosting services. Many of these products have been integrated into Oracle’s portfolio through numerous acquisitions over the years, with the company having spent over $110 billion on more than 150 acquisitions. Additionally, Oracle has invested more than $72 billion in research and development since fiscal year 2012. Currently, Oracle serves 430,000 customers globally across 175 countries, and has a workforce of 164,000 employees.
Late in 2008, Oracle announced its entry into the cloud computing market, with the launch of Oracle Cloud. Instead of relying on local servers and hardware, businesses could now access computing power, storage, and software applications from remote data centres, on a pay-per-use basis. This allowed them to scale their IT infrastructure more efficiently and reduce their capital expenditures.
Oracle has developed a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides a highly secure and scalable infrastructure for businesses to run their applications, while Oracle Cloud Platform (OCP) offers a complete platform for building and deploying applications. Oracle Cloud Applications (OCA) provide a range of business applications, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM) and Customer Experience (CX), all delivered as a service.
Amid this transition, India has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets for Oracle Corporation. In fact, the last few years have been quite exceptional for Oracle’s India business where it has 45,000 employees serving 20,000 customers. To support massive customer demand for cloud services, the global major has also set up two cloud regions in India, with one Gen 2 data centre each in Mumbai (2019) and Hyderabad (2020). Both cloud regions are empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology as a cloud service provider, and are currently running at full capacity, with customers deriving business benefits.
Impressive performance
Today, Oracle is one of the largest multinational employers in India with a large group of professionals across multiple offices, development centres, and hubs for Oracle’s global support, consulting, and financial services operations. Oracle India Pvt Ltd, the wholly-owned subsidiary, is the only organisation outside Oracle’s headquarters in the US to represent all divisions including sales, marketing, consulting, support and education operations for domestic and global clients. India also accounts for Oracle’s largest research and development investment outside the US.
In the last 5 years Oracle India, headquartered in Gurugram, has pulled off an exceptional performance. Oracle Cloud has been experiencing remarkable growth in the Indian market. The company has clocked 50 per cent YoY growth in cloud consumption in Q2FY24. In fact, its Cloud@Customer offering grew 380 per cent during the period.
Oracle India’s cloud-based applications saw 43 per cent growth in Q4FY23. Within SaaS, ERP cloud business has been a big growth driver contributing 34 per cent growth (YoY) in H1FY24. In fact, Q2FY24 has been the third consecutive quarter of growth for Oracle Fusion Cloud Business which during the quarter gained 28 per cent revenues from net new customers.
The company has doubled its customer base over the past 5 years. Importantly, the entire customer base has undergone a big change with the acquisition of Small Medium Businesses and start-ups, which currently account for almost 30 per cent of the whole of the customer base. The SMB business has been witnessing
over 70 per cent YoY consistent growth in cloud consumption for the past
3 years.
From primarily serving large enterprise customers, Oracle India is currently helping a diverse range of customers that include names like Apollo Group, Apollo Tyres, Axis Bank, Bharti Airtel, Cognizant, Fortis Hospital, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, IFFCO, Jubilant Foodworks, Max Life Insurance, myTVS, Persistent Systems, Tata Group as also several state
and central government projects including DIKSHA from the Ministry of Education, Government of India and several more.
Oracle India is actively engaged in major sectors like government (Central and states), banking and finance, telecommunications, power and utilities, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and e-commerce, logistics, start-ups and more. The company today serves 29 states and Union Territories. The country’s top five banks use Oracle’s cloud-based services and solutions to serve their customers and grow their businesses in a more competitive manner.
Oracle offers one of the best ERP applications in the SaaS market. In fact, Gartner has named Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, a leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for product-centric enterprises. At present, India’s financial sector backbone relies on Oracle, even as the country’s top telecommunications providers are run on Oracle cloud. The company has been a crucial partner in building the Indian technology landscape, competing with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Provider and SAP Hana. Having set up its first Product Development Centre in Bangalore in 1994, Oracle India currently has nine Product Development Centres across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, NOIDA, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad. The company boasts a partner network of 600-odd partners including names like PwC, Deloitte, IBM, Infolob Global and Path Infotech. These partners implement Oracle’s projects for its customers.
All this has been possible following the company aggressively building up its capabilities in cloud services and cloud-based applications and solutions in the last few years, which have even helped small businesses carry out their digital journey in a seamless and cost-effective manner. This transitioned it from being a product company to becoming a services company. While the company has migrated a significant portion of its on-premise install to cloud, it is now consciously looking to move the remaining ones as well.
Although the cloud business has been the primary growth driver, momentum has picked up across SaaS, databases and systems. Oracle India has strengthened its offering across applications. The company has designed a next generation cloud that can support any workloads and every application.
“We have come a long way in these years. But the last few years have really been quite exciting for us. We have doubled our customer base in the last 5 years and are expecting this momentum to be maintained going forward as well. In fact, we are looking to again double our customer base in the next 10 years. We have been witnessing a very conducive scenario for growth with the government driving the digital movement,” says Shailender Kumar, 57, senior vice-president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite JAPAC.
“With a complete suite of offerings, we are ready to avail the opportunities with our innovative products and services. Around 7-8 years back, we brought our SaaS products into the market. Around 6 years back, we brought the whole cloud to the market. We set up two data centres and all these things have been a game-changer,” adds Kumar who believes that BFSI, public sector, manufacturing and small and medium businesses, including start-ups, will be growth drivers going forward. In fact, for the company, SMBs are the focus area and hence there is a dedicated sales team for them.
Oracle India is seeing a strong growth momentum in India with demand coming in from across market segments. Customers are reaching out for multiple products and services. New product introductions and enhancements, new and emerging market growth areas like digital native organisations, public sector, e-commerce and many more are generating a lot of demand for Oracle Cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a complete cloud infrastructure platform for every workload. It’s the next-generation cloud designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less.
Max Life Insurance recently moved all of its mission-critical database workloads to Oracle Exadata Database Service running on the Exadata platform in OCI. In addition, Max Life has migrated its core systems to OCI, including customer service, claims management, marketing and policy issuance, resulting in an application performance improvement of up to 70 per cent. Furthermore, Max Life’s business service uptime has remained close to 99 per cent and system performance of core systems has improved by around 30 per cent, thereby contributing to business agility and customer experience.
Suhail Ghai, chief digital and information officer, Max Life Insurance Company says: “As we accelerate Max Life’s digital transformation journey, cloud technologies will be key to enhancing the performance and availability of our core applications for better customer experience. The migration to Exadata Database Service on OCI has laid a solid foundation for us to capitalise on the increasing demand for life insurance in India and propel our growth trajectory.”
Oracle Exadata Database Service is an automated Oracle Database service on OCI that allows organisations to run databases with the highest performance, availability, security, and cost effectiveness. Oracle databases run faster and with fewer resources, powered by the scale-out Exadata infrastructure that includes unique optimisations for transaction processing, analytics, and mixed workloads.
Improving efficiency
Max Life utilises Oracle Cloud Mumbai Region and Oracle Cloud Hyderabad Region for migration. With the Oracle Cloud Regions, Max Life has been able to leverage redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities to enhance business continuity and help meet the regulatory compliance requirements of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India. Additionally, Max Life utilised OCI solutions such as Compute, Storage, Object Storage, and File Server to provide high performance computing and low-cost cloud storage options to help improve the efficiency and productivity of its IT team.
“Exadata Database Service on OCI has enabled Max Life to improve performance across all workloads, optimise cost, and reduce downtime. With OCI’s world-class architecture and the Exadata platform to run databases at scale in the cloud, Max Life is now well-equipped to meet customer demands with agility and improved responsiveness, facilitating business growth.” says Kapil Makhija, vice president, Technology Cloud, Oracle India.
This project was implemented by Infolob Global, a long-time Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) member, in less than five months. “Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are redefining IT strategies since they provide unparalleled flexibility and help organisations address IT redundancy. More and more customers are exiting datacentres and choosing cloud,” says Satyendra Pasalapudi, managing director, Infolob Global. “With our expertise in Oracle cloud deployments, we helped Max Life migrate critical workloads to Oracle Cloud and helped them reduce IT costs, to enable them to focus on innovation and business growth.”
Yubi Group, one of India’s largest lending technology conglomerates, uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run its co-lending platform across India. With OCI’s superior performance, enterprise security, high availability, low cost and globally distributed cloud regions, Yubi is able to bridge the credit gap in India and facilitate scalability in the co-lending sector. Yubi has partnered with 80 per cent of Indian banks and over 150 non-banking financial companies. Its co-lending platform handles more than one million daily average transactions.
“Transitioning to OCI marks a significant milestone, facilitating seamless scalability, enhanced performance, and the establishment of a multi-cloud environment to better serve our customers across India. We opted for OCI due to its dual-region cloud strategy, anticipating over 25 per cent cost savings,” says Gaurav Kumar, Founder and CEO, Yubi Group of Companies. “For India to meet its goal to become a $5-trillion economy by 2025, growth in services such as co-lending becomes pivotal as it powers up India’s businesses. With OCI, Yubi will be able to improve the performance of its co-lending platform, gain greater control of the budget, reduce underused resources, and forecast spending more accurately. OCI will also help Yubi combine cloud services from multiple clouds to optimise cost, functionality, and performance,” states Kumar who is a committed leader with more than 30 years of experience building successful teams and running successful businesses.
Kumar drives Oracle’s leadership in its core businesses such as cloud, delivers on the company’s commitment to customer and partner success, and has built a team of professionals to serve the India ecosystem. Previously, he led the Key Accounts programme, which became one of Oracle India’s most successful, and it continues to date. He joined Oracle as part of its BEA Systems acquisition (in 2008), and has held leadership positions at Quest Software, Microsoft India, and IBM India. Kumar holds a post-graduate degree in business management from the Institute of Management Technology and received his engineering degree from the Institution of Engineers (India).
Multiple businesses have shown interest in migrating to Oracle’s OCI. Tanishq, one of India’s largest jewellery brands, has migrated its inventory management system to OCI, including Oracle Database, Oracle APEX, Oracle Web Application Firewall, and OCI Flexible Load Balancing. With real-time visibility into inventory levels and order fulfilment, Tanishq is able to meet the influx of customer demand and reduce its technology support costs by 30 per cent. Tata Motors has migrated its entire Dealer Management System (DMS) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while Federal Bank relies on machine learning in Oracle’s Autonomous Database to determine what to offer its customers in India’s ultra-competitive banking industry.
Client Acquisition
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business has recently won many new clients including Lulu Group, TVS Credit Services, Tata AIG, Motherson Sumi, Cholamandalam Investments, Digital India Corporation, Kirloskar Management Services, Toyota Financial Services, Mehsana Urban Cooperative Bank, IFFCO eBazar, Bharti Airtel, WIPRO, Kotak Mahindra Bank, PUDA, myTVS and Cognizant.
“As the pace of innovation accelerates and organisations increasingly seek agility, cost savings, and competitive advantages, the transition to the cloud becomes a compelling choice. A robust, high-performance cloud infrastructure is a foundation that allows organisations to concentrate on their core operations and drive growth. Customers are increasingly seeking flexibility and integration across multiple cloud providers,” says Srikanth Doranadula, Group Vice President, Technology and Systems, Oracle India. “At Oracle, we are committed to substantial investments in product and service innovation, offering customers the required diversity and flexibility. Hyperscale cloud providers like us unify cloud ecosystems to enable data distribution across various platforms, creating a multi-cloud environment.”
Oracle Fusion Applications are a suite of applications built on Oracle Cloud that include cloud-based applications for ERP, EPM, SCM, HCM and CX. Oracle’s complete cloud suite of SaaS applications with embedded artificial intelligence bring consistent processes and a single source of truth across the most important business functions. The applications help enterprises improve their customer engagements, increase business’s agility and react to change faster than ever before.
Oracle Cloud ERP is an end-to-end software as a service suite that manages enterprise operations. SaaS is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licenced on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as on-demand software, web-based software, or web-hosted software. SaaS is a business model specific to cloud computing, along with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Oracle Cloud ERP is a cloud-based ERP software application suite introduced by Oracle Corporation in 2012. Oracle ERP Cloud manages enterprise functions including accounting, financial management, risk management, project management and procurement.
“Organizations today are adopting a cloud-only strategy. Gone are the days when they were looking at a cloud-first strategy. So overall, modern applications, whether it’s finance, human resources, supply chain, commerce, marketing, service, or sales — all these functions are looking to modernise with the help of SaaS applications. And to that effect, we definitely want to become the number one SaaS provider in India. SaaS is dominating; when you look at how application SaaS is performing, you will see that SaaS actually comprises the largest share of the cloud services market, surpassing the overall software market. It remains one of the largest segments and is also growing at an exponential pace. Within SaaS, ERP cloud business is a significant growth driver. We aim to delve deeper into core industries and collaborate with top customers because our long-term growth strategy in the SaaS market in India is about capitalising on our ongoing momentum,” says Deepa Param Singhal, Vice President Applications, Oracle India.
The Oracle Fusion cloud applications business has recently acquired a big list of clients including the likes of Jubilant FoodWorks, Jindal Pipes, Jaquar, Motherson Sumi, Grasim Industries, Fine Organics, Fullerton India, Mphasis, Tech Mahindra, TCS, PwC, Equitas Small Finance Bank, Religare Finance, Paymate, Fortis Healthcare, Shri Gangaram Hospital, Aster DM Healthcare, Indira IVF, Asian Paints and Apollo Tyres.
IFFCO eBazar Ltd, one of India’s fastest growing agricultural input retail chains with a well-established e-commerce presence, uses Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to unify its finance operations and drive greater efficiency and productivity. IFFCO eBazar needed to replace its legacy financial management system with a modern cloud solution that would enhance visibility and governance across its business and help to enhance decision making to achieve its objective of providing the modern retail experience to India’s farming community. To consolidate finance on a single, highly secure, and scalable cloud platform and eliminate inefficient manual processes, IFFCO eBazar selected Oracle Cloud ERP in December 2021
my TVS, India’s largest automotive aftermarket digital platform, and part of the $2 billion TVS Mobility group, that operates manufacturing, automobile dealerships, distribution, supply chain solutions, and sales wanted to unify operations and improve business efficiency. With Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for finance and supply chain, my TVS integrated and digitalised processes, enhanced business insights, and improved decision making to support future expansion. The selection of Oracle Fusion Applications was made to improve financial insights and better match inventory with customer demand.
Building cloud capabilities
The setting up of two cloud regions, Mumbai in 2019 and Hyderabad in 2020, followed by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India (MeitY) empanelling Oracle as a cloud infrastructure solution provider in 2021, has been a big growth driver for the company’s cloud business. With this governments and other public sector entities in India can take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation cloud technologies, moving their most challenging workloads, including Oracle workloads to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They now have access to the significant benefits that come from using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including access to Oracle’s Autonomous Database which leverage machine learning and automation to bring increased simplicity, security, and operational efficiency to data management.
“A large number of Indian organisations are looking to change growth orbits with greater focus on cloud-led innovation. With two Oracle cloud regions live in India, we’re fully geared to support our customers in their innovation journey, with adequate support by our specialised Oracle partners,” says Kumar.
According to Gartner, by 2028, cloud computing will shift from being a technology disruptor to becoming a necessary component for maintaining business competitiveness. IT spending on public cloud services will continue to rise unabated. In 2024, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to total $679 billion and projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2027. It predicts that more than 50 per cent of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms by 2028 to accelerate their business initiatives. In 2028, most organisations will be leveraging the cloud as a business necessity.
Sensing the opportunity, Oracle has also renewed its cloud strategy and go-to-market plan as the company looks to elevate the growing cloud market and play a more integral role in driving business transformation for its customers. It is redefining industry landscapes. While its traditionally dominating sectors like BFSI, telecom, and public sector continue to grow, sectors like healthcare, BFSI, manufacturing and telecom, education, etc, are leveraging Oracle Cloud.
Oracle also recently disclosed significant progress in its generative AI strategy, spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, and platforms. This strategic initiative addresses some of the most pressing challenges its customers face. Oracle, through its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Applications and industries solutions portfolio, plays a key role in driving digital transformation in India.
The growing demand for modernisation, the infusion of AI-powered technologies, the emergence of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, the need for data security, the drive to enhance efficiency and productivity, and the imperative of speed to market — these factors are all contributing to heightened demand for Oracle Cloud. What sets Oracle apart from its competition is its unique approach: it has developed a complete, open, and unified suite of cloud solutions, ranging from industry-specific solutions to core applications to infrastructure.
Taking big strides
#India has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets for Oracle.
#The last few years have been quite exceptional for Oracle’s India business where it has doubled its base to 20,000 customers in 5 years.
#Importantly, the entire customer base has undergone a big change with the acquisition of Small Medium Businesses and start-ups, which currently account for almost 30 per cent of the whole of the customer base.
#Oracle Cloud has been experiencing remarkable growth in the Indian market where it has clocked 50 per cent YoY growth in cloud consumption in Q2FY24.
#Oracle India’s cloud-based applications saw 43 per cent growth in Q4FY23
#Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a complete cloud infrastructure platform for every workload. It’s the next-generation cloud designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less
#To support massive customer demand for cloud services, Oracle has also set up two cloud regions in India
#Today, one of the biggest differentiators for Oracle is that it has taken a unique approach and developed a complete, open, and unified suite of cloud solutions – from industry solutions to core applications to infrastrure
Box 2 (optional)
Financial performance
During fiscal year 2023, Oracle Corporation’s total revenues were up 18 per cent to $50 billion, while cloud services and licence support revenues were up 17 per cent to $35.3 billion. Cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues were down 2 per cent to $5.8 billion.
In the recently announced fiscal 2024 Q2 results, the total quarterly revenues were up 5 per cent year-over-year to $12.9 billion, while cloud services and licence support revenues were up 12 per cent to $9.6 billion. Cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues were down 18 per cent to $1.2 billion.
“Demand for our Cloud Infrastructure and Generative AI services is increasing at an astronomical rate,” says Safra Catz, CEO, Oracle. “As a measure of that demand, Oracle’s total Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) climbed to over $65 billion, exceeding the annual revenue. Our cloud businesses are now at a nearly $20 billion-dollar annual revenue run rate, and cloud services demand continues to grow at unprecedented levels. Business is good and getting better.”
“Oracle is in the process of expanding 66 of our existing cloud data centres, and building 100 new cloud data centres, to meet growing demand,” says Oracle Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO, Oracle. “We can build our new data centres very rapidly and operate them inexpensively because they are all highly automated with identical high-performance RDMA networks and the same set of autonomous services. In the next few months, we are turning on 20 new Oracle cloud data centres collocated with and connected to Microsoft Azure. Simultaneously we are building dozens of new data centres in countries all over the world. Demand is over the moon.”
• India has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets for Oracle.
• The last few years have been quite exceptional for the Oracle’s India business where it has doubled its base to 20,000 customers in five years.
• Importantly, the entire customer base has undergone a big change with the acquisition of Small Medium Businesses and start-ups, which currently account for almost 30 per cent of the whole of the customer base.
• Oracle Cloud has been experiencing remarkable growth in the Indian market where it has clocked 50 per cent YoY growth in cloud consumption in Q2FY24.
#Oracle India’s cloud-based applications saw 43 per cent growth in Q4FY23
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a complete cloud infrastructure platform for every workload. It’s the next-generation cloud designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less
• To support massive customer demand for cloud services, Oracle has also set up two cloud regions in India
• Today, One of the biggest differentiators for Oracle is that it has taken a unique approach and developed a complete, open, and unified suite of cloud solutions – from industry solutions to core applications to infrastructure
Arbind Gupta
arbind.gupta@businessindiagroup.com