Oracle president Phillips on visit from today

When Charles E Phillips, president of the $10 billion Oracle Corporation, starts his whirlwind tour of Mumbai and Bangalore tomorrow, he will have enough reasons to say cheers.

The company's performance in India has been improving significantly (the Indian operations topped the list of the company's fastest growing business regions last year), and Oracle expects the country to move up to the third position from fifth now in its list of the top 10 Asia-Pacific business destinations.

The importance that the company attaches to its India operations is evident from the huge hoarding just in front of the main convention hall at the four-day Oracle Open World, which started here on Monday. The hoarding says the National Stock Exchange of India, which runs on Oracle software platform, has been able to reduce its settlement time by 57 per cent.

Not that Oracle's top executives are unaware of the pitfalls. The company has 6,000 employees in India but its revenues are far lower than in China, where it has only 600 people on rolls.

Derek Williams, executive vice president of Oracle's Asia Pacific division, attributes this to the huge gap between China and India's per capita software spend. But Williams says things are changing fast in India.

Oracle's two development centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad form part of the company's global development team providing software research and development across the company's product family for Indian and global markets.

India also hosts a number of global operations that make it possible for the company to conduct 24x7 consulting, finance and administration, marketing and support operations, in addition to software development, William's says.

(The writer is in Shanghai at the hospitality of Oracle Corporation)