Oracle is now the world’s fastest growing cloud company: Sunil Mehra, Oracle India

As cloud becomes more mainstream and adopted by many small and medium businesses in India, Oracle is betting big on the adoption of cloud-based solutions and infrastructure in the Indian market. Sunil Mehra, Vice President-Cloud Platform, Oracle India, shares his perspective with EC’s Rachana Jha

What is the current scenario of cloud infrastructure market in India?

We are seeing businesses strengthening their focus on transformational innovation to drive new growth. Based on my meetings with customers, it’s clear that more and more CIOs and CDOs are realizing the need to transition to a modern, enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to accelerate innovation and unlock new growth opportunities. Various reports by analysts and industry experts corroborate this trend as well.

Per Gartner, hybrid cloud solutions are driving overall cloud adoption in India. It is also predicted that spending in public cloud services will reach $186.4 billion in 2018. Gartner believes the worldwide demand for IaaS will continue with strong growth through 2021, which benefits the cloud related services market, such as development, implementation, migration services, etc.

What are the latest trends, according to your new research?

According to our new Your Platform research, a group of 730 IT professionals associated with forward-thinking businesses have reached cloud maturity (on an average 70 percent or more of their applications operating on cloud) and are outperforming their competitors.As per 12 percent of respondents, these ‘cloud masters’ are more data driven, have better access and insights of their business information, are more innovative and hence, better able to respond to customer needs with greater relevance, speed and agility.

Key insights of the report:
• One-third (35 percent) of IT executives surveyed stated that their cloud strategies are fully-developed and largely implemented.
• Less than a fifth of this group (18 percent) can be classified as ‘cloud masters’, revealing a gap between what companies are talking about and what they are doing.
• 43 percent reported that strategy implementation is progressing.
• One-fifth, however, say their strategy development for cloud is in its infancy

Additionally, one of our research reports says that the proportion of Indian businesses reaping the rewards of embracing cloud infrastructure services has increased significantly in the last quarter. The research also found that 78 percent of businesses believe IaaS delivers exceptional operational performance in terms of speed and availability, a 19 percent quarter-over-quarter increase.

Key insights of the report:
• Over three quarters of respondents (77 percent), believe IaaS makes it easier for businesses to innovate.
• 78 percent of businesses believe IaaS delivers exceptional operational performance in terms of speed and availability, showcasing a 19 percent quarter-over-quarter increase.
• Nearly three quarters of the respondents (70 percent) observed that their organization experienced improved productivity from their migration to cloud, and just under two thirds (62 percent) noted that their IT teams have greater scope to work on other value-adding projects.
• Nearly three quarters of businesses (71 percent) believe that companies not investing in IaaS will struggle to keep up with those that are using it.
• The report also highlighted that moving to IaaS has significantly cut time to deployment of new applications and services, and slashed maintenance costs for over two-thirds of respondents (74 percent).

Where does India lie in comparison to IaaS adoption around the world?

According to a report by 451 Research, globally, just 6% of enterprise workloads are currently running on IaaS. Therefore, the market opportunities are enormous. Due to improved broadband connectivity, burgeoning smartphone penetration and rising awareness about cloud solutionssuch as IaaS,cloud adoption is increasing in India. The popularity of consuming everything as a service in the business space is led by continued growth of the SMB and startup ecosystem in the country. India is one of the fast growth markets for cloud infrastructure within the APAC region.

Which sectors in India do you see catalysing the initial growth of IaaS?

IaaS offers vertical agnostic advantages. We’re seeing increased demand from businesses across BFSI, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, E-commerce, IT/ITES, Telecom, Government among others. While we’re witnessing more non-core workloads being migrated to the public cloud (such as test and dev), it’s only a matter of time before companies seriously consider moving production workloads to the public cloud.

Can you highlight Oracle’s cloud strategy in India and share examples of a few key customers that you are working with?

Oracle is now the world’s fastest growing cloud company at scale and the only company that can offer a complete portfolio across all three layers of the cloud: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS is betting big on the cloud, specifically in IaaS. What differentiates Oracle’s IaaS cloud from others is its enterprise orientation and cost effectiveness.

Organizations including IFFCO ebazar, NCDEX eMarkets Ltd, Birlasoft, Zensar Technologies, State Bank of India and Helpage are amongst those who have chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to speed innovation and deliver exceptional customer experiences.