Oracle will double workforce in India

Rahul Neel Mani / New Delhi

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said that Oracle will double its manpower of engineers and developers from the current 3,200 to 6,000 in India. He was speaking via satellite from Redwood Shores, California to the delegates of the Oracle executive summit, Indian customers and the media.

Larry Ellison

Ellison said that India is and will remain the only preferable destination for software and IT services, as opposed to China, which is known for its manufacturing capabilities. "Professional services will keep moving to India from all over the world because the country has proved very strongly that it has best-of-breed manpower," said Ellison.

Oracle, which has set up its largest development centre outside the US in India has currently two centres here—Bangalore, which looks after database software and the Hyderabad centre that handles e-business software.

Ellison said, "Oracle, like Microsoft and General Electric will keep increasing its software engineering teams in India." On the issue of competing with SAP in the ERP space, Ellison said that Oracle is number one in the database space and SAP is a leader in ERP applications. "But for the past two years we have been outselling SAP in the ERP space as far as the Indian market is concerned. I would like to see the same happening in other countries. We have around 200,000 customers worldwide and the number is still growing at a steady pace."

Ellison also said that Oracle, like IBM, which has floated a concept of E-business on-demand, will soon launch the concept of ‘On-Demand’ pricing for its applications. "Oracle is offering application clusters on Intel platforms and such boxes are available at affordable prices (of $6000) in the market. These include two Linux boxes on Intel architecture," said Ellison.

Citing the healthcare business as the next big segment for IT, Ellison said that the government should adopt a national health records database. "Healthcare data is very crucial for curing and treating a particular ailment. Both medicinal treatment and patient records can be useful in further improvement of the treatment process.

A national health record database can help doctors and researchers cure ailments faster and better," he said.

Ellison stressed on the need for such databases for all government and public sector departments and asked various state governments and departments to take such initiatives. Ellison suggested the use of IT and computer systems for not only saving money and time but also saving human lives.

Ellison also remarked that Indian companies are still lagging behind the global level of service efficiency. "Indian corporates and government departments have to improve their standards to match global levels," said Ellison.

On the open-source movement, Ellison mentioned that countries in the European Union are strongly adopting low-cost Linux-based next-generation systems. "India should also follow the same trend before it’s too late," said Ellison.

Oracle launched an ‘e-governance centre’ in partnership with Hewlett-Packard to facilitate developing proof-of-concept solutions for e-governance applications. The centre is based at Oracle’s India headquarters at Gurgaon.

The company, which is actively working on becoming a complete solutions provider, is already working with four states in the e-governance sector and is in talks with 13 more states to begin the programme.