Oracle bets big on hybrid cloud offering to drive business

Says cloud-based services often 'misunderstood' as only cost saving option

Oracle is betting big on its cloud-based services in the country with a flexibility to run business operations on premise and claims cloud migration is often "misunderstood" as only cost saving option.

The US-based software firm said its pitch for hybrid offering of running or moving back to on-premise technology services is resonating with customers; since a lot of them are moving from rival cloud providers where the total cost of operations exceeds the initial cost for customers.

Some of the customers have of late realised that the movement of business operations on cloud is beyond cost saving, Mitesh Agarwal, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Oracle India, said. 

He added: "It is completely misunderstood because our competitors went and told them all the time you will save cost; some of them had fallen into that argument trap, and they started realising that a few other things (applications) are not added, did not have the skills, or never turned out to be as cheap."

IT research firm Gartner has forecast the Public Cloud Services market in India to be worth $1.8 billion in 2017. The cloud services market is shared amongst companies such as Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and others.

Agarwal said the cloud-services requirement for enterprises is different from a small firm or a start-up.

"Businesses have now started realising that the movement to cloud is primarily for agility and transformation. As enterprise businesses do not operate like a start-up for migrating its operations on the cloud, only cost is not the right approach and they care for their security. Some of the global players who came into India did not understand local market requirements, the cost aspect never worked in India," said Agarwal. "The reason is the players that were there did not do enterprise computing? It is okay to have Netflix stream from the cloud, it is not okay for them to have e-business on the cloud. We are seeing a lot more core applications movement."

Big business organisations or public-sector undertakings usually expect their cloud migration to be secure and not shared on any common data storage platform. Oracle said it is capitalising on this demand for dedicated infrastructure.

"For all our cloud services, when the customer buys the service, they get a deployment option, the option to deploy on the Oracle public cloud or you get the choice to deploy behind your firewall, but still in a cloud environment, both are cloud offering, agile, similar price points. (For some organisations) even if you have an India data centre, they still want to move into a dedicated data centre," said Agarwal.

Oracle India said that its hybrid offering would also give its clients, who use its software through the traditional licensing model, a flexibility to move to cloud. "Even if we are selling a license, the moment the customer is ready to move to cloud we can do it easily and that is the design decision we took given our large license business," added the Oracle India CTO.