Our transition is two-fold and it’s all driven by cloud first approach: Prashant Ketkar, Oracle

Oracle as a company is in the midst of fairly significant transition. The transition seems to be two-fold and driven by cloud first approach. The first transition for Oracle  is to be the biggest and largest provider of enterprise applications in the cloud and the second big transition is around technology and making technology available as a service for customers, developers and IT professionals. “As you know on premise we are a fairly large applications company and we are fairly large technology company with database, middleware so on and so forth. We expect that by making the transition into the cloud, the technology cloud business would be very big for us as well as the enterprise applications business,” says Prashant Ketkar, Vice President – Oracle Cloud in an interview with Mohd Ujaley.

Edited Excerpts:

How is Oracle evolving as a company? What is the main purpose of your visit to India?
Oracle as a company is in the midst of fairly significant transition. Our transition is two-fold and it’s all driven by our Cloud first approach. The first transition and first big bet for us is to be the biggest and largest provider of enterprise applications in the cloud. It normally gets referred to as SaaS. The second big transition and focus for us is around technology and making our technology available as a service for our customers, developers and IT professionals across the world.

When I say technology, there are two pieces of technology – one is the core infrastructure piece which is basically compute, storage and network and making those available as elastic, highly commoditised, highly scalable set of services that developers can consume. And, the second piece is modernising our portfolio of products that we have on premise today such as database, identity stack and application server stack and delivering that as a service to our customers. So technology-cloud and application-cloud are the two big focus areas for the company.

As you know, on premise we are a fairly large applications company and we are a large technology company with offerings such as database, middleware, etc. We expect that by making the transition onto the cloud, the technology cloud business and the enterprise applications business will be big for us.

In terms of what we have available in the market as services – we have storage as a service which is essentially a highly commoditised and highly scalable object store where you can store media, files, videos, images. We have taken our database product as a service, Weblogic suite which is basically the application server technology and are delivering that as a service. So, we have a robust set of Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions.

Oracle’s core value proposition for the customers is that they can use our software while not being concerned about the maintenance and management of the application. Thee application tier is completely automated so that our customers can focus only on the application.

We see tremendous potential in India and the country is a big focus for us as it’s a growing economy. There is a large developer population here, the start-up environment is booming and the public cloud service is at the centre, facilitating and even accelerating the innovation ecosystem in the country.  The primary purpose of my visit to India is for us to make sure that the Indian market is aware about our Cloud offerings.

What are your broad sets of focus in the market?
There are two broad segments of customers that we are focusing on. First is our existing install base of customers. In India, Oracle has a thriving business and we have some of the largest Telcos and manufacturing companies who run on our technology.

If you go and talk to the CIOs today, they all want to do something with the cloud – from a large manufacturing company to a financial institution. They are all trying to figure out new and modern ways on how the cloud which can help them innovate.

Although most CIOs know that the cloud can offer tremendous potential to their business, they are not aware about how to unlock this potential.

So, a major part of our conversation with them is around helping them through that journey and making them understand about how they can move their existing investment to the cloud.

How do you modernise the investments that was in many cases made over 30, 40 and even 50 years ago? In many cases, it’s hard to modernise them. I know lots of enterprises who are still running cobalt code and they are literally afraid to touch that piece of code and the guy who has built that application has left that company, they are worried if they touch, it will break and will fall down.

To go to these customers and say to them that we will rip all this apart and write a new modern application is easy to say but very hard to implement in practice. But you can take that application and move it to the cloud and get benefits around optimisation of the infrastructure. You are no longer buying servers and spending lot of capital on that but can progressively start modernising around the edges.

Eventually, yes, you’ll transform the applications to this more modern footprint or the modern language of the cloud. So that is one focus.

Secondly, we also work with independent software vendors (ISVs) who are building applications for enterprise to take our solutions to these customers.

Where does Oracle find itself in the overall scheme of government of India’s programes such as Digital India, Make in India, Smart Cities etc?
Whether it is the US government, European government or Indian government, there are federal initiatives underway and then there are initiatives being undertaken at state or local level. Federal initiatives are longer term while the state and local government initiatives are more time bound.  What I see is that there is faster adoption happening at the state and local level with respect to cloud. For example if I am a small Gram Panchayat or I am a small department and I do not have a large IT establishment. But I want to do a community outreach, build a website and have it up and running quickly. It will be very hard to do this in an on-premise environment. But the cloud instantly facilitates and provides gratification around that.

When it comes to Federal set-up it is a longer journey because you have to get the government comfortable with cloud technologies. There are issues around datacenter, pricing, data sovereignty etc. These discussions take time and they are taking place. But I see a lot more adoption happening at state government level.

What is the role we see ourselves playing, well I think just like we saw governments around the world, deploy Oracle technologies on premise, we expect that we will play a similar role both as trusted advisor as well as a technology provider when it comes to transitioning to cloud. I think that a country like India has an immense opportunity, because while there is some legacy, it does not have same amount of legacy as developed markets around the world.

For example, look at the telephone journey that India went through versus the telephone journey that US went through. US infrastructure is, frankly, still not as modern as the Indian infrastructure particularly when it comes to wireless and smartphones. You will see the similar pattern in India. India is going through this inflexion curve and in not so distant future, the country will be ahead of other nations in adopting the next wave of technology and I think cloud will help facilitate that change.

Is there any plan to set-up a datacenter in India?
As we focus more and more on India, we will have to think about datacenter presence in the country. We are in the process of figuring out how we can get more involved and how can we facilitate that. When is the right time to make the investment, how we can overcome some infrastructural challenges like shortage of electricity grids etc. We do see ourselves setting up a datacenter in the near future.

Oracle has huge focus on cloud technology and how same could be applied to overcome growing silos in government projects?
Cloud can help overcome silos in many ways. If you are running in a public cloud environment, then you are delivering a service to end users, across departments, whoever wherever they might be.

For example, if you had to build your own system, you would buy the database, hardware, operating system, etc. from multiple vendors. Then you will typically call a systems integrator like Infosys, Wipro to put these together for you. There are bound to be boundaries because multiple vendors are involved.

Whereas, in the cloud, the solution is completely integrated. Database, application or server – they are all integrated, they are in the same datacentre and we will do all the wiring for you.

Therefore, in the cloud, there is immense opportunity and potential to break down technology barriers. The challenge is largely because of a mind-set as people have to give up control, it is little hard to let go and transition.

There is no compelling answer on the sovereignty of the data. In your opinion who should own the data?
Technology industry has seen fair amount of disruptive transitions. You had personal computing, then you had the internet – World Wide Web and now you have the cloud.

Around the world, regulations have never kept pace with technology. Eventually regulation catches up but then it’s time for the next wave of new technology. It is true for any country around the world. You are going to see that now as well.

To your question as to who should own the data, it has to be the customer, whoever the customer is – whether the government or a commercial entity. What is more important is to ensure data is always accessible and it is secure.

We as a company are focusing on these aspects – to ensure availability, do away with redundancy, enable disaster recover.

What is your strategy for the Indian market?
In India, we are focusing on enterprise segment customers who are looking to transition to the cloud. We are focused to ensure that we provide our customers the best place to run Oracle technology in the cloud and provide them with highly open, flexible standard based platforms.

Tomorrow, if our customers chose to run Non-Oracle technology workloads in our public cloud environment, we want to enable them to do so.

When we compare ourselves with companies such as Amazon and Google, the key differentiators for us is our ability to provide enterprise applications. This helps us provide customers with the architectural capability to build, develop and test the applications on the cloud which provides them with a great deal of flexibility both on premise and on cloud. Also, our ability to expand on premise and the cloud provides our customers with a robust infrastructure.

Oracle has the broadest portfolio of enterprise apps and therefore we are in a very unique position for enterprise customers to consume our technology. The breadth between on premise and off premise, integration across SaaS, PaaS and the infrastructure is fairly unique to us.

Where does India stand in the overall scheme of things of Oracle?
India is a growing market for Oracle and we are very bullish about growth opportunities here primarily because the growth rate of the economy is very healthy. The country has a highly educated and motivated workforce. The penetration of technology is deep and there are a lot of developers in India. In fact, the country has the second largest number of developers after the US in the world. We are positive that the growth in the Indian market will accelerate due to which the adoption of cloud will accelerate as well.

Do you see some substantial changes in enterprise outlook in India now?
The landscape in India has changed drastically. The back-end technology for developers was earlier accessible only to a few corporations. Today, the cloud has changed that. It is available to a developer across most universities and they now have access to the best technology. The fact that India has a young thriving technology population makes me believe that we will see a lot of innovation happening in India. I believe that the millennials in the country will leverage technology to develop cutting edge solutions.