After 50% YoY growth, Oracle India charts course for cloud business future

Oracle India is revamping its cloud strategy by shifting to a vertical-focused structure from the current business unit-wise model, senior executives said on February 13, aligning the India business to its global change in structure.

These verticals will include traditional sectors such as BFSI, telecom, manufacturing, education and the public sector along with newer verticals as they mature.

Meanwhile, the company’s cloud business in India grew 50 percent YoY in the second quarter ended November 30 (Oracle follows June-May fiscal year). Cloud, generative AI and security are driving demand in the country, the executives said, coming at a time when the cloud software major is aggressively expanding its data centres globally.

Cloud consumption from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) grew by over 70 percent YoY for the past three years, the company said. Apart from the growth percentages, Oracle declined to disclose any India-specific numbers on revenue, deal sizes and other metrics around cloud and overall business.

At the company’s second-quarter earning conference in December, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO said that the company is expanding 66 existing data centres and constructing 100 new ones and also working on co-locations of 20 new centres with Microsoft Azure.

With over 600+ customers in India, including UPI, Flipkart, Apollo Hospitals, Fortis, Ola, ICICI Bank, Federal Bank, Wipro, PwC, Meesho, Genpact, Oracle is seeing significant demand in the country across sectors.

Speaking to the media at the Oracle CloudWorld Tour in Mumbai, Srikanth Doranadula, Group Vice President, Technology, Oracle India,” India as a country is building good digital public infrastructure, delivering services and ensuring financial inclusion. There’s also momentum seen across different verticals. We’ve seen in BFSI, telco, government, and startups are different story completely.

“With all of this, cloudification is inevitable,” he added.

Oracle has cloud regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad helping customers deriving business benefits of scale, price, performance, and reduced costs – through multi-cloud or hybrid cloud.

In September 2023, Oracle announced that it is partnering with Microsoft, taking a multi-cloud approach and offering its database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but deployed in Microsoft Azure datacenters

Focus on SaaS and generative AI
The company is also betting big on software-as-a-service (SaaS) opportunities. Across its applications business which includes SaaS, ERP Cloud business, the business unit grew 34 percent YoY as of H1 FY24, that is between June-November.

Nearly 28 percent of the company’s revenue came from net new customers in Q2 and that is expected to continue growing. Overall, Oracle has been seeing an 81 percent continued renewal rate from customers.

Deepa Param Singhal, Vice President of Cloud Applications, Oracle India said, “We’re seeing huge demand in India for our SaaS applications. It’s estimated that the SaaS business will grow to be a $50 billion business here in India by 2030. This brings a massive potential for us and we are gearing up to cater to this growth.”

Singhal shared that Oracle added around 1200 features in ERP last year. The company comes out with 100 new SaaS features every 90 days. Around 80 percent of this product roadmap is driven by what customers asked for.

Oracle is embedding generative AI across its entire SaaS suite in partnership with Cohere, and will be releasing 50 new generative AI features for its customers who will be able to use them free of cost, Singhal said.

“We went and asked our customers whether they be willing to adopt generative AI and I think 87 percent of them are very excited about it. So there’s a huge openness and eagerness to adopt generative AI,” Singhal said.

At present, Oracle has about 50,000 employees in the country, with a majority of them being developers, and engineers focused on the SaaS offering. MoneyControl