Govt push, deregulation and IT skills are the catalyst for digital transformation: Neil Sholay, Oracle
There are certain geographical regions that are much more advanced in moving towards digital because they have very good skills base and their governments have made a national initiative to try digital. In case of India, Neil Sholay, vice president of Digital, Oracle EMEA says that the Indian market is probably about 12 months behind some international markets, but India has all of the right ingredients to be one of the leading nations for digital. “You have the government making digital a top priority. They are not only talking about it, they are doing it,” he says in an interview with EC’s Mohd Ujaley.
What is the role of the Digital Business for Oracle across EMEA?
The Digital Business across EMEA supports some of our most strategic clients like Unilever and Nike and Credit Suisse among others, all the way to some fairly innovative startups. We help companies in building their digital strategy and support them on their journey to become digital businesses.
Our team is a mixture of technical experts, digital architects and design thinkers. They work with clients to help them design the experiences, the products and the services that they want to launch in a new digital world.
Our core is to assist clients in developing their digital strategy. For example, if someone like Unilever is looking to become more digitally oriented; we can help them develop that strategy, help them figure out the customer journeys they want to go on and create prototype of the products that they want to bring in the market in the shortest possible time.
In India, we are working with IDFC Bank, which is a digital bank, in launching some of their digital services.
What are the key business areas that are going digital?
There are three areas where people use technology for digital. The most highlighted or talked about is the customer experience (CX). But the other areas that are often overlooked are digital operations, which is using digital technology for supply chain management, human capital management and the third area is innovation – like going digital for innovating new products, services and strategies.
When we launched this initiative four years ago, the market was very much focused on CX, most of the customers wanted a robust CX, but now they are moving ahead. They are realising that along with CX, having a strong data platform or having capability of machine learning is very important. Today we can provide a full technical CX but a large portion of the work that we are doing with clients in EMEA or Asia-Pacific (APAC) are actually beyond CX.
What Oracle solutions come into play while enabling this digital transformation?
From the CX perspective, we have a range of cloud services like a master cloud, service cloud, sales cloud, commerce cloud. For example, Thomas Cook here in India uses our service cloud to provide in-house customer service. Similarly, companies like Reliance Commercial Financial services are using sales cloud and our service cloud.
If you look at a digital operation, we have human capital cloud to manage, identify, search talents within organisations. It helps in digital recruiting, digital training, digital on-boarding etc.
We have also got ERP for managing business supply chain management. Finally, we have cloud services like IoT cloud service, integration cloud service, mobile cloud service which tend to be used to manage channels and extend businesses mobility.
Most of the companies have legacy IT investment, so how do they ensure a good balance between on-premise and digital?
There is two pieces of advice. The first, we talked about the concept of bimodal IT or two speed IT, where you accept that you don’t have an existing on-premise infrastructure –some of which might be moving at a slower speed. And what I mean by that is you might want to change capabilities of that slower speed IT on a daily or hourly basis. Then you have a faster speed IT, which could be used for innovation and the system of engagement where you might want to think about social & mobility, analytics and machine learning. This you need to be able to launch it in a matter of hours, test it, change it, and use it again. So, first piece of advice I would give is to think in terms of two speed or something even multi speed IT.
The second thing, I would say, Oracle is unique in this industry. We don’t make differentiation between on-premise and cloud and public cloud. So today we can go to a customer, it could be the IDFC Bank or HDFC Bank and say we can help in your transition to the cloud and build a digital business in the cloud.
How has the digital business for Oracle performed over the years?
I can’t disclose exact numbers, but I can say this that in the first year, we were very positive, we made enough revenue but I think it was paying for the investment which was made. From year one to year two, we more than doubled the business. Year two to year three, the growth has been increasing. I can tell you this that the growth has been scaled up and this is now a business within Oracle that is growing phenomenally.
This business has been successful because within Oracle we have not been a separate business unit. We have not really separated it from the rest of the organisation. We believe that digital is everyone’s job in Oracle, be it a sales consultant, a marketer, a management consultant, an architect or a sales reps. We have trained thousands of people in Oracle to be comfortable talking about digital business, digital transformation. And because of that we have been able to have all these discussions and that’s a huge benefit on the amount of business that we are getting around digital.
From a global perspective, how is digital moving?
If you look at it just from a global perspective, there are certain geographical regions that are much more advanced in certain industries. For example, Spain, Nordics and UK have been very adept at moving towards digital business. Now, half of that has to do with very good skills base. But part of it is because of the governance – the governments have made a national initiative to try digital.
If you look at India, the Indian market is probably about 12 months behind some international markets, but India is always ensuring a self-kind of growth – it’s growing at a much faster rate than Europe. Even aspects like demonetisation, although that’s painful, it is going to drive the incubation much more towards using digital currency and digital payments. And in the long term that will make India a highly competitive nation.
Now, in terms of industries, utilities are doing very well. They have been very quick towards digital. The telecom industry has done very well, and so has the hospitality industry and hotels. These three industries are the ones that have been leading consistently. The retail banking industry actually has been just a laggard, now they are catching up.
Why is there disparity in moving to digital?
Some governments have made digital a top priority, and they are pushing for it. Some of it comes down to regulations. If you look at markets that are fairly well deregulated, they have more freedom to experiment and bring more products to the market. So that’s one of the reasons why I think the retail banks have found it hard to innovate around digital. Sometimes the regulations made it harder. Another reason is if you take a region like the Nordics and Scandinavia, they always had an IT culture.
So there is not one single reason for this disparity, but it is a combination of government intervention, regulation, available skills and also some digital disruption that comes to the market that change the bulk of the status quo.
What is your view of India on digital adoption?
India has all of the right ingredients to be one of the leading nations for digital. You have the government making digital a top priority. They are not only talking about it, they are doing it. Things like demonetisation and move towards digital payments and mobile payments are a few examples. Clearly, India has some of the hottest skilled people in the world when it comes to technology skills. I mean that is one of the best exports of India to the world. It has a young population. It has millennial who want to continually live in the digital services world. India has a lot of the right ingredients in place.
