India is one of our key and fastest growth markets for Oracle worldwide: Kapil Makhija, Head-Technology Cloud, Oracle India

Covid-19 has accelerated enterprise cloud adoption by several years. The public cloud computing model, with its flexibility and price savings – compared to the cost of maintaining and updating internal data centers – has proven highly helpful for enterprises looking to fast-track growth recovery and improve business resilience. According to Gartner, global spending on public cloud will grow a healthy 23 percent this year to $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020. In the wake of this, CIOs thinking on whether to move data and applications to the cloud are now evolving their thought process, drilling down further to figure out which data and applications to move to which cloud.

There are a few reasons for this new acceptance of multi-cloud. And for most businesses, choice of multiple cloud providers is a good thing, because more choice also means businesses can pick different clouds for different workloads or application types. This is important because, while all clouds offer the same basic services, not all clouds are built the same, with second-generation clouds offering the best price-performance-security benefits. The end result? A new set of ‘Cloud-Smart’ enterprises that are driving faster cloud innovation leading to consistent business growth, superior customer experience and increased profits.

Express Computer spoke to Kapil Makhija, Head-Technology Cloud, Oracle India, who tells us some of the key trends that he is witnessing in the cloud space in India

Some edited excerpts:

What are some of the key trends that you are witnessing in the cloud space in India?
Multicloud is a key trend we’re seeing in the enterprise space. The rationale is simple. While they want to avoid single vendor lock-in, they also want to use best-of-breed cloud services from a range of cloud providers. Further, CXOs are realizing that certain workloads run better or cheaper on different clouds.

Reports by research and anlyast organizations validate this trend gaining traction. Per a recent Greyhound Research survey, State of Cloud 2021, over 70% of large organizations (INR 5000 cr and above) in India consider a multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud strategy superior to investing in a single cloud type. So more and more Indian enterprises are mapping strategies that mix and match cloud providers. And this is leading to enterprises seeking greater cloud interoperability from their cloud providers.

Is the Indian market tuned towards a particular model – public, private or hybrid?
By its very nature, a one size fits all approach isn’t the best way to look at cloud. That said, broadly speaking, in the enterprise space, in addition to multicloud as mentioned above, another key trend we’re seeing is that hybrid cloud environments are on the rise. In most cases, with enterprises, it’s a blend of a multicloud, hybrid cloud model.

Organizations are realizing that a well-integrated and balanced hybrid strategy can help them reap greater benefits than a fragmented approach. A well-designed hybrid cloud strategy can help enterprises scale better and faster by taking advantage of the public cloud’s innovative and flexible services. The ensuing benefits: superior cloud economics, greater choice, improved agility, greater regulatory compliance as well as improved business resilience.

What are the significant changes you have seen with respect to the cloud market in India since the pandemic?
Cloud adoption has risen multi-fold. Enterprises are now leveraging cloud as a platform to accelerate innovation. Benefits, such as availability, scalability, and flexibility, are driving cloud investments. Early adopters of cloud and digital technologies have witnessed the least impact on their business operations. By and large, organizations are fast-tracking their cloud journey to strengthen digital resilience and future-proof the business.

How is Oracle gearing itself to take advantage of new opportunities in this space?
We are fully aligned to customer needs. We are taking the lead to help our customers gear up for a multicloud world. Our strategic partnerships, such as the one with Microsoft Azure, reflect this commitment. This makes it easy to extend applications from Azure into Oracle and from Oracle into Azure. Our partnerships with VMware and ServiceNow are also resonating very well with customers.

And when it comes to helping customers in their hybrid cloud journey, our strong focus on serving our customers’ requirements keeping location flexibility as well as control in mind, is something that customers are appreciating.
Tell us about the kind of growth and demand you are seeing for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

A few weeks back, we announced the expansion of our global cloud footprint to meet continued triple-digit growth for OCI. We now have 33 cloud regions worldwide, making it one of the fastest expansions by any major cloud provider. In parallel, we are using the principles of modern cloud economics to help enterprises understand the benefits of using our next-generation cloud infrastructure services in order to help them extract more value from their cloud usage.

Closer home, India is one of our key and fastest growth markets for Oracle worldwide. Over the last 4-5 years, we have consistently clocked high double-digit business growth in the country. In fact, India was one of the first few countries to get two local, next-generation Oracle Cloud Regions (Mumbai and Hyderabad) in quick succession. Both these cloud regions are seeing very good cloud consumption, with continued growth. Hundreds of organizations are using OCI in India, and are reporting 30-40% improvement in application performance on average. Also, they are reporting time savings to the tune of 30%. They are citing faster migration and improved data management, leading to faster reporting and analytics, especially for some of the long-running and time-consuming reports/procedures. To top it all, they are also reporting 30-40% upfront cost savings with our predictable and transparent pricing structure.

To address continued/growing demand in India, we are further investing and expanding our cloud presence in the country. The expanded cloud region will be set up and managed by Nxtra, the datacenter unit of Airtel, will be available for customers in early 2022. This reflects our commitment to India as a market and to our customers and partners.

How do you see the future panning out with respect to the cloud space in India?
As a cloud major, we understand our responsibility to help develop a modern cloud ecosystem in India. We realize that to help customers gear up for a cloud-first world, it’s imperative that our partners are equipped with the right skills and expertise. Therefore, we are offering free OCI training, plus free certification, via Oracle University until end of the year. We encourage more and more technology professionals to advance and future-proof their career by learning OCI for free with our expert-created training and globally recognized certification program.