Hirak Kayal, Vice President – Applications Outbound Product Management, Oracle India, discusses trends around cloud applications and Oracle’s strategy for Fusion with Mehak Chawla
When it comes to deploying applications on the cloud, what are the key trends that you see in India?
For the last couple of years, cloud has been adopted in niche process areas like cloud for CRM, HR etc. However, it is going mainstream today and being adopted across process areas. We have been investing in our cloud offerings and applications since the last 8 years through acquisitions as well as internal expansions. So, today what we have built is an enterprise grade cloud application. It is comprehensive enough to cater to customer needs across process areas like financials, procurement, project management, inventory as well as entire CRM and SCM apps.
The three key changes that we see impacting business processes heavily are social, mobile and analytics. In our cloud solutions we have considered all this capabilities.
How are you addressing security concerns while positioning Fusion apps to cloud customers?
We have been developing Fusion for almost 8 years and a significant amount of investment has been poured into it. We went about it by asking our customers what are the components they would want to include if they were to build their dream applications. That is exactly what we have done when building Fusion apps from ground up. We realized that it has to be an application which is built completely on industry standards like Java and entirely build on service oriented architecture (SOA). Then we looked at analytics at an architectural as well as process level and embedded that in the solution in three forms: real-time, predictive and ‘what-if’.
Fusion’s development involved more than 1,000 different customer organizations and partners, and more than 4,000 hours of requirements gathering, design validation, and hands-on testing. More than 400 customers are on Oracle Fusion Applications globally. Two-thirds of the customers have chosen to deploy applications in a SaaS model.
As far as security is concerned, we are addressing it through our own product. Oracle identity management is the leading identity management solution in the market and we are giving that as a part of our stack. So, when people are accessing Fusion applications on cloud, they are leveraging the power of our identity management solution as well. We think that will take care of a lot of cloud related security concerns in India.
There has been a buzz around your Fusion applications for the last two years, but it was made available only in mid-2012. Do you think Oracle entered a bit late into the cloud arena?
It is true that we started talking about Fusion about two years back and general availability started about last year. A key reason for this is that we wanted to launch our localization solutions and we are now HR ready from a localization perspective. Localization is a complicated development and hence it often proves to be time consuming. We don’t believe that we are late movers. The key with our solutions is that we can offer everything on cloud as well as on-premise and that’s where we differ from our competition.
Today, we already have 25,000 cloud users in India. This number is sure to see a spurt as serious ERP kind of adoption on cloud is just beginning to happen in India. Most of our customers are looking at a span of 1-5 years for adopting the full application suite on a cloud model. Some of our existing cloud customers are Standard Chartered Bank, Siemens, Havells, HelpAge India, Macmillan India, Aurobindo Pharma and Borosil.
Rapid deployment is one of the key pitches that you are making with Fusion. What are the other go-to-market strategies and the verticals you are looking to target?
Fusion’s implementation time can begin from as less as 3 weeks . Besides this, we are telling our customers that we are flexible both from cloud as well as an in-premise model. We are also working hard on building our partner ecosystem because it is a completely new technology. We have a dedicated team for partner enablement. In fact, many partners have gone as far as to subscribe to Fusion apps for their own businesses.
There are two aspects to Fusion apps. One is back-office which is HCM and finance and the second is front office which is CRM and SCM. From HCM and finance perspective our key focus is on localization and strategic compliance functionality. From front office perspective we are constantly working on mobile and analytic capabilities. We are also building vertical capabilities. Our key focus are telcos and pharmaceutical vertical. We are also looking at BFSI.
As far as pricing goes, Oracle Cloud Services are priced on a monthly subscription basis. Depending on the service, they are either priced on a per user-per month or per environment-per month basis. The price can start from Rs. 2000 per user-per month, depending on the user and IT environment.
