The Hindu Business Line : Oracle to target new high-growth areas

ORACLE is expanding rapidly in India, mining new segments and broadening offerings. With the Peoplesoft acquisition, its customer base has grown significantly in the Asia-Pacific region, and its recent i-flex deal would help it build on this expansion.

While e-governance has emerged a focus area where the company has had big wins, areas such as clinical trails hold promise. The Chennai Water Board, the Gujarat State Electricity Board, and AP and Uttaranchal Government projects have become referenceable in e-governance.

The Managing Director of Oracle India, Mr Krishan Dhawan, under whom the i-flex deal was clinched, has vast banking expertise. He spoke to Business Line recently. Excerpts:

How does Indian market stack up for Oracle?

India is the fourth largest market for Oracle in the Asia-Pacific, up from the 10th position earlier. It has high growth potential.

Oracle has established its dominance in the FSI (financial services and insurance), telecom, Government, and some manufacturing sectors, and will continue looking at upcoming potential industries to remain ahead.

With over 200 partners including system integrators, independent software vendors, and consulting partners, Oracle is broadening its reach. TCS, Wipro, Infosys, and Satyam have large global service practices around Oracle solutions.

Oracle India has come a long way. Where do you see it heading?

Oracle has clearly established its dominance in the database segment.

The strategy now is to build upon our strengths in the database area and extend this across the enterprise applications space and middleware.

Oracle is eyeing both the software as well as the solutions pie, offering integrated information architecture.

Customer relationship management and human resources management systems dominate, along with areas of clinical trails, pulp and paper, and metals.

The strategy now is to target new high-growth areas. With the economy doing well and Indian companies becoming part of the global supply chain, industries such as retail, auto, and textile have immense growth potential.Small and medium businesses continue to be a growth driver for us.

How does India fit into Oracle product development and support, with specific reference to Project Fusion?

India is a key development base for Oracle, with Bangalore and Hyderabad centres being the largest outside the US.

A number of factors help in making India an important hub in our follow-the-sun operations model. This helps shorten product development time, contributing to making India a critical part of Oracle's strategy.

Both the Oracle IDCs participate in all global product development work that gets initiated by Oracle's global software development team in California.

Development and software services teams for all four-product families of Oracle are located at India centres.

The Hyderabad centre has grown pretty big. Where is it heading?

Keeping in mind the importance of India and to keep pace with our ever-increasing business in the country, we recently acquired land in Hyderabad and would be inaugurating a new building there in a couple of months, where the various operations of our Hyderabad IDC will be consolidated.

The employee numbers will increase as per business requirements.

Acquisitions have been key thrust area for Oracle. How do they impact Indian developers?

We had acquired Retek followed by ProfitLogic sometime back. These have helped strengthen offerings in the retail space and help offer a wider range of solutions for the retail industry.

Such focus areas need specific development support. They enable us to provide a wider product offering to the domestic customers.

In certain cases, the products have to be localised to meet the regulatory requirements of the Indian markets and the localisation teams in the IDCs address this issue.

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