With the demand for enterprise services on the rise, Oracle has decided to take a leaf out of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s India strategy and decided to expand its data center footprint in the country. The IT giant has now launched its second data center (also referred to as cloud region) in Hyderabad, less than 8 months after its first data center launch in Mumbai. The move is part of Oracle’s global plans to operate 36 second-generation Cloud regions by the end of 2020.

Speaking exclusively to CNBC-TV18, Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India said that the data center reflects Oracle's commitment to India.

"This will be the 23rd of the 36 data centers globally, that we planned to launch by the end of 2020. We have launched 2 cloud regions in less than a year. Our focus will now be optimising these. We will see the performance from a customer perspective and then decide on the road ahead after this year. A large number of Indian organizations are looking to change growth orbits with a greater focus on clouded innovation. With two Oracle Cloud regions live in India, we’re fully geared to support our 15,000 plus customers in their innovation journey, with adequate support by nearly 1,000 specialized Oracle partners," he said.

So what does a data center footprint in India do for Oracle? Oracle's enterprise customers will see faster and better performance while using all of Oracle's cloud products. In India, the company has clients across sectors like banking and financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, telecom, etc. Some of the key clients include Bank Of Baroda, Bata, Indian Oil, Niti Aayog, Manappuram Finance, to name a few.

"Indian customers and partners will have access to all Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Autonomous Linux, as well as Oracle Cloud Applications, to unlock innovation and drive business growth," said Shailender.

"We expect Oracle Autonomous Database will drive our next big growth leap in India. A large number of Indian businesses are upgrading to Oracle Autonomous Database. These early adopters represent a mix of large enterprises, mid-size firms, and born-in-the-cloud startups, hailing from diverse industries: from banking (Federal Bank) to digital commerce (Codeinks), consulting (Huron) to public sector healthcare departments. Some of these early adopters have been able to lower costs through reducing administration costs by up to 80 percent with complete automation of operations and tuning while reducing runtime costs by up to 70 percent by paying only for resources needed at any given time,” he added.

Most new inquiries are for heavy-duty analytics workloads from the BFSI and Retail industries.

“Oracle’s unique dual region strategy enables customers to deploy resilient applications in multiple independent cloud regions for disaster recovery - without having sensitive data leave the country, thereby complying with regulatory requirements around data sovereignty as well as operational issues associated with operating in multiple countries," explained Shailender.

First Published:Jun 29, 2020 12:48 PM IST