Infotech Lead India: Cloud is transforming businesses across the world, and IT departments are shrinking due to the substantial reduction in IT hardware and associated infrastructure. Database major Oracle drives enterprise cloud adoption by offering private and public clouds to everything from enterprise applications to middleware, database, servers and storage devices.
Dhruv Singhal, senior director, Sales Consulting, Oracle India, details the current cloud scenario and shares Oracle’s cloud strategies.
What is Oracle’s Cloud strategy?
Cloud computing is driving a significant part of Oracle’s product development plans – from enterprise applications to middleware, databases, servers and storage devices, as well as cloud management systems. Oracle offers technology that enables organizations to build private clouds, leverage public clouds and provide cloud services to others. Oracle also offers a broad set of horizontal and industry applications that run in a shared services private cloud model as well as a public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud model. Oracle’s long history of technology innovation along with approximately seven years of relentless engineering and key strategic acquisitions enabled the organization to recently launch the most comprehensive cloud offerings in the world.
Oracle today hosts and manages the world’s largest Oracle cloud, powering a combination of public and private clouds on behalf of thousands of Oracle customers and more than 5 million users. Oracle generates about $1 billion annual revenue from Web-based software solutions and more than 25 million users rely on Oracle Cloud every day.
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the world‘s first engineered system specifically designed to provide enterprises with a foundation for secure, mission-critical private cloud capable of virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity. Exalogic is the ideal platform for applications of all types, from small-scale departmental applications to the largest and most demanding ERP and mainframe applications.
Exalogic is the fastest growing Oracle engineered system with 3X Y/Y sales bookings based on the last two quarters of FY 2012. To date, 40% of Oracle Exalogic’s growth comes from customers who have chosen Exalogic over competing solutions from IBM, including mainframes. It has been adopted by hundreds of enterprises in 43 countries across 22 industries, including in India.
Oracle’s overall corporate strategy is to provide the industry’s most complete, open and integrated set of products from applications to disk. For cloud computing, Oracle’s strategy is to:
- Ensure that cloud computing is fully enterprise grade – Oracle provides enterprise grade technology for high performance, reliability, scalability, availability, security and portability/interoperability (based on standards). Enterprises demand these characteristics before moving important workloads to a public or private cloud.
- Support both public and private clouds to give customer choice –Organizations are adopting different deployment models for cloud computing for different applications at different rates of speed. Oracle supports public clouds as well as on premise private clouds Deliver most complete PaaS and IaaS product offerings – Oracle provides the most complete portfolio of software and hardware products to enable organizations to build, deploy and manage public and private PaaS and IaaS. A key element of Oracle’s strategy is to offer the Oracle PaaS Platform.
- Develop and enable rich SaaS offering – Oracle offers a very broad portfolio of horizontal and industry applications that are deployed in either a private shared services environment or in a public SaaS model.
How is Oracle managing a slow off take of cloud among Indian enterprises?
Although cloud adoption has seen a slow take-off in India, enterprises both large and small have realized that cloud is a critical component in their IT strategy. We believe that enterprises are on a journey to cloud computing. Most will evolve their current IT infrastructure to become more “cloud-like” – to become a better internal service provider to the lines of business, BUs, departments – to provide greater agility and responsiveness to business needs, higher quality of service in terms of latency & availability, and lower costs and higher utilization. This evolution will take time. Not only is the available technology evolving and advancing, but enterprises are also working on the new policies and processes needed. In many cases, the technical building blocks for cloud computing are available in advance of enterprise readiness, so we think that enterprises will evolve at different rates.
Private cloud is too expensive. What are your strategies to increase usage of private cloud?
Oracle’s strategy is to offer compelling benefits to customers that can act as great drivers in increasing private cloud adoption. The advantages in cost, security and agility by providing on-demand access to applications, platform and infrastructure in a self-service, elastically scalable, and metered manner are escalating enterprises’ interest in private cloud. Oracle has in fact seen an increase of 28 percent from 2011 in private cloud adoption.
Be it for cloud applications, cloud platforms or cloud infrastructure, Oracle’s private cloud products include a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class, integrated applications, platform, and infrastructure products and solutions. Private clouds enable organizations to have complete control and visibility over security, regulatory compliance, service levels and functionality.
Oracle is one of the world’s leading providers of horizontal and industry-specific cloud applications. Oracle’s cloud applications can be deployed in a private cloud and hosted and managed through Oracle Managed Cloud Services. Oracle’s Cloud Platform provides a shared and elastically scalable platform for consolidating existing applications and developing and deploying new applications. Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure offers a complete selection of servers, storage, networking fabric, virtualization software, operating systems, and management software to support diverse application requirements. The recently launched Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0 technology eases the process of running private clouds on Oracle’s Exalogic engineered systems
Is there any substantial difference between the demand for private and public cloud?
Cloud computing has been and continues to be adopted by enterprises across industries in many different ways. It represents a fantastic opportunity for technology companies to help customers simplify IT. According to IOUG (International Oracle User Group) research, private cloud adoption has increased from 28 per cent in 2010 to 37 per cent in 2011. Moreover, it saw a 50 per cent increase for public cloud adoption over a period of one year, from 2010-2011.
With over 100 different Oracle applications on the cloud, including ERP, HCM, Talent Management, Sales & Marketing, Customer Experience, Oracle is witnessing strong momentum for its cloud applications in the Indian market.
Although public clouds were typically getting more attention in India due to its cost-saving benefit, private clouds potentially offer more significant advantages over time including lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased security control, and easier integration. This is especially true for customers considering the use of cloud technologies for business critical applications and IT services.
Which are the main industry verticals looking for cloud adoption?
Cloud has been seeing a lot of demand across industries. Industries like telecom, BFSI, retail, education, healthcare and government are increasingly turning to the cloud to simplify IT. The demand for public cloud has recently shown an increase in the mobile and broadband sectors; pharmacy, manufacturing, e-commerce, retail and travel were the early adopters of public cloud. These sectors involve both the SMBs as well as larger enterprises.
Are there demands for Cloud among Indian SMBs?
SMB customer adoption of cloud computing is rising strongly with cost savings and flexibility being among the key motivators. Cloud computing allows these companies to use world-class infrastructure without the need of purchasing hardware and maintaining large support teams. Pay-per-use also gives them the agility and flexibility to grow quickly when demand increases.
Public cloud does offer a compelling business case to SMBs. Some benefits are low upfront costs, economies of scale, simpler to manage and operating expense. However, SMBs are still holding back. This is because many SMBs are not ready to trust public cloud providers. Their main concerns are over privacy and security. They also worry what will happen to their data if their Cloud-supplier goes out of business. Adding to all of this is the fear of letting go of control.
SMBs are expected to try out small private cloud computing initiatives. These will help to build confidence in cloud services technology gradually. .The appeal of private Cloud stems from the fact that control remains with the SMB in that they fully manage the solution. This is much more suited to SMB culture.
What are your expansion and investment plans?
Oracle today hosts and manages the world’s largest Oracle cloud, powering a combination of public and private clouds on behalf of thousands of Oracle customers and more than 5 million users. Oracle generates about $1 billion annual revenue from Web-based software solutions and more than 25 million users rely on Oracle Cloud every day. Oracle Cloud is a strategic offering within Oracle’s comprehensive cloud services portfolio.
Oracle remains poised in the position to address needs for extreme performance and mission-critical computing, so that companies can reap the greatest ROI out of their IT investments. We remain committed to customers at different stages of IT adoption. We believe that enterprises will evolve their current IT infrastructure (from standalone, consolidated and optimized) to become more “cloud-like” or “IT-as-a-Service”.
“IT-as-a-Service” will see IT departments become a better internal service provider to the lines of business, business units and departments. IT will become more agile and responsive to business needs, give higher service quality in terms of latency & availability, offer lower costs and maintain higher IT resource utilization.
