Oracle to open its own data centre in India

Firm sees increasing traction in govt space; centres to help host applications, cloud-based solutions

With the increase in adoption of cloud-based applications and solutions and expected surge in demand from the government segment, enterprise software company Oracle is now mulling data centres in India. This would help the company to host the applications and various other cloud-based solutions within the country, given the sensitivity of nature of government business.

“We don’t have (own data centres in India) today though we are evaluating it. We are in discussions with a lot of local players on it though we don’t want to give any timeline or any definite plan. But certainly, the growth that we are seeing in cloud drives demand for that,” said Thomas Kurian, President, Product Development at Oracle.

CLOUD PRESENCE

• Implementations of projects make take few months, says firm
• India is the second largest employee base for Oracle globally
• Engineers in India are equal partners in firm’s global R&D
• Setting up a product development centre in GIFT city, Gandhinagar
• Expects huge growth in mid-market segment

Recently, Microsoft which is also a competitor of Oracle in certain business segments, announced setting up three data centres in India, its first in the country, to offer its applications and solutions in a secured environment. Last month, Oracle had announced its plans to open a cloud data centre in Brazil to support its software-as-a-service offerings. Slated to be operational in August, this will be Oracle’s 19th cloud data centre worldwide.

Kurian said the company has been opening between six and seven data centres per year, during the last three years and would continue to do so based on the demand. Oracle has a comprehensive suite of cloud offerings covering database, storage, big data, mobile and customer relationship management solutions and platforms. “Today we have around 600 products in the cloud; about 220 of them are applications and around 240-300 are platforms in infrastructure and data offerings. They represent a huge percentage of our total customer offerings,” added Kurian.

With the push by the Indian government for initiatives like Digital India, e-governance and m-governance, global companies are gearing up to tap those opportunities which may result in increased adoption of technology solutions in this segment. For Oracle, the public sector which includes the government and semi-government bodies are the largest customer in India.

“A lot of projects which are being discussed and a lot of projects are being identified as a part of the Digital India plan. I think it is just a matter of a few months or a year, we could see them getting executed,” said Shailender Kumar, Managing Director of Oracle India. “So overall, all meetings and discussions are moving in the right direction,” he added.

Other than public sector, the company is expecting to see good traction in the banking, financial services and insurance, telecom and manufacturing and in the midmarket space.

Oracle, which opened its first product development centre in Bengaluru in 1994, today employs over 30,000 people across different locations, including Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Noida and Trivandrum. A third of these resources are in core product development.

“India employs Oracle’s second largest workforce of developer and engineers, making it one of our most important product development centres across the world. The talent here and the work the teams are doing have played a very important role in helping our customers transition to the Cloud,” added Kurian, who is the first Indian to be appointed as president in Oracle and is also considered to be one of the serious candidates to be the next chief executive of the tech giant.

The company is now planning to set up a centre in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) which is under development in the Gandhinagar district of Gujarat. The company, however, declined to divulge further details about the size of the workforce it is planning to station there, though sources said it is planning to leverage the financial knowhow of the local talent in the city.

In FY15, Oracle hired over 2,300 engineers in the product development functions in India of which around 18 per cent were fresh college graduates. The company said in FY16, the hiring will continue at the same pace.