The Indian economy is transitioning to become a knowledge-based economy driven by digitalisation, data literacy, and technological prowess. Business leaders are inclined towards technologies that not only incorporate intelligence into their operations but also integrate data silos into one common data pool to draw insights that help them make intelligent decisions. At the same time, they help create a connected enterprise. Cloud applications with embedded capabilities are at the forefront of this and have been a priority for leaders.
First, a quick look at the broad contours of the marketplace. IDC predicts the overall India public cloud services market to reach $13 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.1% for 2021-26. During the first half of 2022, software-as-a-service (SaaS) remained the largest component of the overall public cloud services market, followed by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). SaaS continues to be a dominant cloud offering for businesses as they look at scalability, flexibility, and agility.
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Oracle is dominating the SaaS space by relying on innovation, consistent upgrades, and customer centricity to expand the potential of their offerings. It has established itself as the world’s fastest-growing cloud provider with an overall growth rate of 45% in dollar terms for cloud revenue (IaaS plus SaaS), with SaaS revenue increasing by 42% in dollar terms in Q3FY23, which just ended. With two data centres in India, Oracle is witnessing an upward cloud consumption increasing to 125% in 1H23 vs 1H 22.
Getting IT right
Talking about Oracle’s differentiators, Adrian Johnston, senior vice-president, cloud applications, Japan & Asia Pacific, shares, “One of the areas in which we have made big investments as we transitioned from a product to a service firm is driving consistent valuable innovation. Oracle Fusion Applications’ quarterly update cycles provide customers with continuous innovation, without downtime or business disruption. We keep our customers at the centre of these updates, and 80% of the capabilities we release every 90 days are driven by our customers.”
Cloud applications such as ERPM, HCM and SCM, are assisting organisations in breaking down silos across business verticals and processes in driving integration across portfolios. Srinivasa Raghavan, MD of myTVS explains as to why the car accessories brand chose Oracle Fusion Applications for streamlining its internal operations and increasing supply chain efficiencies. “MyTVS is a digital automotive aftermarket platform that has created the largest mobility ecosystem across 25,000 garages, 3 million plus customers, 15,000 plus retailers, 65 plus suppliers, and insurance & fintech companies into one cloud AI platform, providing predictive service and parts management solutions. This strong cloud-based platform will be under one customer data hub with over 100 million+ records through AI-driven use cases. Choosing Oracle and implementing Oracle Fusion applications will allow us to work towards these goals by strengthening the processes across business levels and verticals,” he said.
Vikram Bector, president and group chief human resources officer, Piramal Group, says, “Oracle is supporting us extensively for many of our hiring related activities, and the onboarding experience with Oracle Fusion HCM is quite superior, especially during the pandemic. Additionally, for talent management which involves high potential assessment, we rely heavily on the HR cloud solution.”
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Common pitfalls to avoid
While SaaS applications continue to gain popularity and adoption among businesses, there have been some challenges. The difficulties include lack of specialisation, customisations, data sovereignty, and localisation concerns, among others. Herein, players like Oracle are uniquely positioned to address these through innovation. The cloud provider has introduced a vertical-specific applications suite for the healthcare sector, localised applications like HR Payroll are now available on their India data centres, the fusion applications come embedded with AI/ ML capabilities and consistent automatic updates to cloud applications are supporting enterprises to keep pace with technology dynamism.
Betting big on India
Inspite of global headwinds, Oracle is witnessing stable growth in India. “For our applications in H1 this year in India, we’ve seen 74% YoY growth in business from the BFSI sector with leading banks like Axis bank, Kotak, HDFC, ICICI, Federal bank, AU Fin adopting Oracle Cloud and 100% growth in education and research,” says Johnston. “We continue to be a preferred SaaS solution provider in the healthcare space with 160 % growth.”
While the cloud market is expanding, there is also fierce competition from other players. The differentiation lies in cloud players’ efforts to innovate, understand market requirements, and keep customer centricity at the heart of their offerings.
