After ten years of operating in the Indian IT space, Oracle India is now readying itself to aggressively focus on verticals like healthcare, education, e-governance, infrastructure development, security, banking, BFSI and the manufacturing segment. Punita Jasrotia attended the Oracle seminar in Goa recently and filed this report

Shekhar Dasgupta says that Oracle realised that if it had to succeed, it needed to focus more on solutions rather than components

Oracle India has come full circle in India. From selling its database products through a distributor back in 1987, it today owns development centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad and has also established an Indian subsidiary.

As part of its strategy, Oracle is planning to ramp up its workforce from close to 2,400 to 6,000 professionals and expand the Hyderabad operation by setting up another facility of 8,000 square feet, which is expected to come up in the next 18-24 months. While the Bangalore centre works on Oracle’s database, development tools and Web technologies, the Hyderabad unit is focused on Oracle’s enterprise resource planning products.

The company was one of the first MNCs to set up a development centre in India, and recently completed 10 years of its Indian operations. To celebrate the occasion, the company conducted a seminar entitled, ‘How Oracle changed India and India changed Oracle,’ where it focused on its journey from being a RDBMS player to becoming an integrated business solution provider. The company says that one of its most significant achievements has been its continuous ability to provide cost-competitive premium quality products which have a high return on investment focus. The company also announced its future expansion plans, in terms of infrastructure, manpower and introduction of new products to further tap the Indian market.

The 10-year journey
Oracle started its Indian journey way back in 1987 when it first entered India through its distribution tie-up with TCS. This tie-up mainly focused on establishing Oracle’s presence in the then-evolving database market. In fact, TCS, which back then was an advantage partner of Oracle, is credited as establishing Oracle as one of the premier database players in India.

From there the company went on to establish its Indian subsidiary in late 1993 and later on went on to establish its Indian Development Centre in Bangalore to support its product development strategy for global markets. During this time, it also brought a change in its business model wherein the company shifted to a two-tier distribution model from its earlier direct marketing strategy and started targeting new segments as well.

From then on the company grew from strength to strength. Next on the agenda was the move to introduce Oracle application servers. While globally the company had already introduced these servers, it took a more aggressive stand in India in the late 90s. Around that time the company also decided to work with new partners and develop its own in-house capabilities. “We realised that if we had to succeed, we needed a different approach, where the focus should be more on solutions rather than components,” says Shekhar Dasgupta, managing director of Oracle India.

A landmark year for Oracle India was 1998, when it shifted all its business on the Internet and began offering its e-business suite of products. And today, the company’s business can be easily segmented into two areas—Oracle 9i (focused on technology) and Oracle 11i (launched in late 2000 for its e-business solutions and more related to applications).

On the technology front, Oracle is optimistic about its Oracle 9i database, which is the first database software to run any packaged application with unlimited scalability and total reliability across multiple computers, and has already gone through 15 security certifications. Another potential product is the Oracle 9i application server. According to IDC, the application server market is expected to be worth $4.4 billion by 2006, which signifies considerable potential for the company. The server was the first application server to integrate more than 12 middleware functions, including built-in portal software, wireless and voice functionality, caching, business intelligence, clustering and support for Web services and open standards. “In future, most of the applications will become inter-enterprise applications and there would be a need for better integration,” predicts Dasgupta.

Expansion plans
Today the Indian operations consist of over 2,370 employees, which will be further increased to include professionals engaged in managing sales and marketing, product development, global support and consulting, and internal BPO services. Company sources say that plans are on the anvil to increase the workforce to close to 4,000 professionals in the next couple of years.

Pravir Chand, the finance director of Oracle India says that out of the one lakh job applications the company receives it is only able to use 1 percent of the resumes. “Besides having a whole team of professionals looking after our recruitment process, we have developed some in-house programmes to help recruit, train and retain the best,” he says.

In case of infrastructure, currently the Oracle Technology Park at Bangalore hosts three major Oracle divisions—Oracle India Development Centre (IDC), India Support Centre (ISC) and Oracle Solution Services India (OSSI). These divisions comprise a Centre of Excellence which supports the company’s global operations. What is significant about these centres is that India is the only country to have centres of this size and scope outside the US. In Hyderabad too the company has set up an IDC and its global support centre.

Some of the key projects under way at the India Development Centre include work on the Oracle9i database and database appliance, the e-business suite and e-business infrastructure technology, Oracle Mobile, Discoverer, iLearning and the Oracle student system. The centre has filed for more than 10 patents.

SME is another growing segment for the company. However, it is the large corporations where it expects significant revenues to come from. The company also plans to focus on the pharma and healthcare industry where it sees huge demand potential.

In addition to this, the company sees business opportunities in verticals like banking, telecom, insurance, manufacturing and utilities.

Future focus
As part of its future focus, Oracle India has defined four major areas to concentrate on. The first focus is ‘education for all,’ which is done through the Think.com initiative. The purpose of this programme is to bring education to children in schools in a digitised format. Besides this, the company is already also doing a lot of constructive efforts for spreading and improving the standards of technical education in the country. Oracle has launched a worldwide programme for government and government-aided schools. For its first phase of the programme in India, the company plans to work with the Karnataka government as well as the state education department. Besides this, it also runs an Oracle School of Advanced Technology in the technical education arena.

The second focus area is security, which according to Dasgupta has quite a growth potential. The company is also eyeing e-governance projects as a prospective golden opportunities. “Considering the growing awareness and the central government’s guidelines on spending 3 percent of budgets on e-governance projects, the company is very optimistic about creating next generation e-government systems with significant benefits to the citizen,” he adds. One of its recent successful examples is of the e-Seva project in Andhra Pradesh.

The company might soon introduce some of its e-governance initiatives implemented in the US market, in the Indian market too. Company officials say that currently it is in talks with various state and central governments to implement its e-governance initiatives. “There are three major areas where we plan to focus on. The first is to target more states (company sources say Oracle is currently in talks with 20 states). The second, is to focus on citizen services like billing and revenue collection. In the government sector there are two kinds of applications—transaction-oriented and workflow-based applications—as there is a lot of file movement that happens between and across departments. “We see a lot of government-to-business opportunity in this area. The third area is security, which is going to become a significant focus area for most companies,” says Dasgupta.

Another focus area is healthcare, where the company might be introducing an Oracle healthcare solution. And lastly is infrastructure development (consisting of roadways and airports, where the company plans to invest in terms of technology).

In addition to this, the company will continue its focus on BFSI and the manufacturing segment. According to Dasgupta, in this decade-old journey, while the challenges have been immense (considering the number of players in the market), it is Oracle’s continuous endeavour to innovate, which has helped it achieve its present success.
“The basic challenges in front of us were reliability, affordability, scalability, performance and many more, which I believe we have been able to target quite considerably,” he says.