India Oracle’s Hunting Ground

Since coming to India, Oracle has played a significant role in shaping the information technology industry inside the country and has established a footprint unmatched by most of its multinational competitors. Today, India is Oracle’s fourth-largest market in Asia-Pacific in terms of revenue, up from tenth a few years ago, and boasts the largest research and development investment outside the U.S.

Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, is eyeing to capture a bigger share of the Indian market in its fight to gain a stronger foothold against its competitors. The company will continue to strengthen its market share in the Indian market.

Oracle has been in India for 22 years. In fact, Oracle was one of the first multinational software companies to set up operations in India. Beginning with a distributorship through Tata Consultancy Services in 1987, the company established direct operations with a liaison office in 1991, and in 1993 formed Oracle India Private Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corp., focussed on the sales and marketing of Oracle software in India.

Kaushik Mitra, General Manager, Applications Channels, Oracle India, foresees a great future for Oracle in India. Dubbing India as one of its most important markets, he says, “Today, only Oracle can offer a robust, integrated information architecture comprising both database and applications, which is based on open standards. Our strategy is to capitalize on this integrated offering across industries and verticals in India.”

“We work very closely with the 450-plus partners in India. Oracle also has seven development and solution centres in India, including an Asia R&D centre, a partner solution centre, an e-governance centre, a retail centre of excellence, and three global development centres at Bangalore, Hyderabad and NOIDA that focus on developing Oracle products for the global market,” adds Mitra.

In recognition of the significant pool of highly educated software development engineers based in India, Oracle opened its India Development Centre (IDC) in Bangalore in 1994. This early commitment to the country marked Oracle’s vision for India as both a domestic market and a centre for research and development. The company became the first multinational company to establish core software development operations in India to support its global product development strategy and to address the needs of the local market. Initially, the India Development Centre took on development work on a project basis for different development divisions as determined by the company’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Today, Oracle has its India Development Centre located at Bangalore and Hyderabad and sales and marketing offices across six Indian cities.

Oracle President Charles Phillips says, “The fast rate of development, high literacy rates, and availability of IT skills in each of these cities represent an untapped reservoir of future economic wealth for India.” In order to leverage India’s world-class software development skills base and consistent on-time delivery of high quality products, Oracle India underwent significant investment and rapid growth in operations. The India Development Centre in Bangalore became an extension of three headquarters development organizations – Tools Division, Server Technologies Division and Platform Technologies Division.

In addition to providing software development for the entire Oracle product family for Indian and global markets, Oracle India has become host to a number of other functions critical to Oracle’s operations as a global company. Through the six facilities of Oracle India Private Ltd., headed out of Gurgaon near New Delhi, the company offers sales, marketing, consulting, education and support to local customers. Additionally, Oracle India hosts a number of global operations that make it possible for the company to conduct 24 by 7 consulting, finance and administration, support and sales operations, in addition to software development. Oracle India represents the only organization outside Oracle’s headquarters in California to represent so many divisions and lines of business, effectively mirroring Oracle’s global operations.

Servicing Oracle customers worldwide, the Global Support Centre in India is one of four Global Support Centres in the world offering technical support for the entire range of Oracle products. Through 24 by 7 coverage, Oracle has the ability to provide critical support to customers and to deliver higher–quality, more efficient technical support regardless of time zone. The global support team in India helps provide faster response to customers worldwide by leveraging the technical and functional skills available in India, and enabling 24 by 7 support for critical service requests. The India team is involved in global programs for knowledge management, service automation and proactive support to improve customer experience through increased self-service capabilities. The Global Support Centre in India also helps manage Oracle On Demand customers worldwide, providing them with better maintenance and administration of their Oracle software at a lower total cost.

Oracle operations in the Indian market consist of licence sales, consulting, education, and product development and support services. Oracle has dedicated sales teams across its technology and applications business focussing on companies of all sizes and across private, public and government organizations.

Another of Oracle’s key strength lies in the fact that it continually assesses the needs of local customers to ensure that our products are localized for organizations to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Oracle has, in the past, delivered software to meet local requirements arising from finance policy changes specified in the Union Budget or otherwise, regulatory compliance pertaining to value-added taxation, among other things. Oracle also provides customer support for and development of the India-specific features in its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications in addition to the support for India localization features across other product families.

Yet another recent initiative by Oracle towards further enabling partners to develop solutions that cater to the local market, has been the launch of the Partner Solution Centre (PSC) in October 2007.’The Oracle Partner Solution Centre at Gurgaon enables strategic partners to build, port, enable and test their solutions on Oracle technologies, and hardware infrastructure sponsored by Sun Microsystems and AMD in a secure environment. With this, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), value-added distributors and resellers (VADs & VARs) can leverage Oracle’s in-depth product expertise, proven set of processes, tools and best practices at the PSC to build their industry-specific solutions on top of Oracle’s technology and applications platforms. At the India PSC, partners can use all the relevant tools and materials to help them build and migrate solutions based on Oracle open standards and methodologies, proven processes, tools and best practices.

Oracle has a comprehensive portfolio of products and solutions to meet the needs of organizations across various industries in the mid-market space. The latest offering in this area is Oracle Accelerate, which is an industry-specific solution to address the needs of mid-sized companies across Asia-Pacific. Oracle together with 50-plus partners has launched more than 80 industry-specific applications to cater to 30 industry segments in 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Oracle Accelerate is Oracle’s approach to meet the diverse IT requirements of the mid-sized companies combined with partner expertise. Mid-sized companies face various challenges in terms of outperforming competition, managing time, cost, risk, etc. and hence, require solutions to improve margins and manage workforce. Oracle Accelerate is specially designed and priced for the mid-sized companies to enable them to adopt modern technologies easily while reducing IT complexity and costs.

Oracle has partners of all sizes, big and small and mid-tier partners who are equally important to our business, more so to tap the lucrative mid-sized organizations sector. Our expansion into high growth cities in India is a part of our strategy to engage partners into businesses in those cities. Oracle regularly organizes joint road shows with its partners across cities to educate customers on the benefits of IT adoption.

“Our existing business model relies on close integration with partners as each partner has different specializations.“Through the Oracle PartnerNetwork the company provides multifarious benefits as partners gain access to Oracle’s premier products, education, technical services, marketing and sales support, thereby providing partners with the resources they need to be successful in today’s global economy,” says Mitra.

Oracle has put in substantial investments and resources towards partner development through the funding of hardware, sales incentives, technical resources, joint ISV programme memberships, joint customer-ISV references, ISV porting centres, and various Go-To-Market initiatives. Oracle is also empowering its partners to deliver industry-specific and cost-effective IT solutions for mid-sized businesses in India, through innovative go-to-market initiatives and ongoing training and support programs across the country to enable partners to resell, install and implement Oracle software.

Mitra says, “Our partners help us reach out to customers in the country across more than 25 cities. Our partners have the geographical reach, the skilled resources and implementation skills to help our customers deploy and use our software effectively. Therefore, partners are the cornerstones of our go-to-market strategy in India.”

Oracle offers customers the world most integrated, open and standards-based software and information architecture. Oracle partners play a critical role in selling, deploying and implementing that software in our customers’ businesses. Partners help our customers put our software to its best possible use. More than 80% of our business in India and Asia-Pacific is generated through our partners. We work closely with them to develop industry solutions for the local market. In fact, our association not only enhances’our market share and revenues, it also adds to incremental revenue opportunity for partner organizations through solutions built on Oracle technology and applications and also through the implementations they undertake. And now with Oracle’s expanded product portfolio, partners get an opportunity to develop additional skill sets that will enable them to implement and offer new solutions to different industries and also to Oracle’s existing customer base of 7,000 customers in India. We also launched the Partner Solution Centre at Gurgaon to help our partners meet the changing India customer needs. The centre is working towards increasing our partners’ market readiness.

India Oracle’s Fourth-Largest Market
Oracle continues to build a strong domestic business in India, engaging in sales and marketing of Oracle software and services, including consulting, education and support of all Oracle products.

With offices in Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Gurgaon and 17 growth cities, Oracle India operates in all 28 states and works with leading companies in the telecommunications, banking, insurance, manufacturing and utilities industries, in both the government and private sectors. The Oracle Database 10g supports transactions and interfaces in 13 major Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil.

Oracle currently has 6,000 technology and over 600 applications customers in India, and counts some of the most important government and private organizations amongst those using Oracle software and services to reduce costs, increase productivity and innovate business operations. Oracle is also committed to the Indian market through its extensive network of more than 200 channel and alliance partners who are part of Oracle PartnerNetwork. These include companies such as iFlex., Infosys, Satyam, Sonata, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro.

India holds great promise as a domestic market for Oracle software solutions. The mid-market segment makes up 40 per cent of Oracle’s current customer base in India. Oracle expects small, local companies in the region to drive the future growth of Oracle’s business. As Indian companies seek to expand their businesses to new markets in and outside of India, they will need to invest in information technology, including databases, e–business technologies and applications that provide real business value – the core competency of Oracle.

To address this opportunity, Oracle has charted an aggressive growth plan to rapidly expand its presence in India. Known as the “Emerald India” initiative, the plan is intended to fully leverage the potential of the highly skilled Indian workforce to take advantage of new opportunities in a variety of industries. From this commitment to, and investment in, the Indian market, the company expects to dramatically grow its domestic business while contributing further to the burgeoning Indian economy and the advancement of the information technology industry. Oracle’s commitment to India is reflected in its US$2 billion investment in five years since the year 2001. This includes a large investment in i-flex Solutions, the India-based global software leader in core banking solutions. Oracle owns majority stake in i-flex Solutions.