'I say this with confidence basis the extraordinary growth we are witnessing in our cloud sales as compared to others,' says L L Guisquet, President, Oracle EMEA and APAC

What, according to you, are doing the rounds in cloud computing space?
The top trends in cloud computing are really around customers moving up the value chain to draw  advanced value by deploying Platform as a Service (PaaS) along with Software as a Service(SaaS). We are seeing immense growth in SaaS and PaaS over the last few quarters and growing adoption of these layers in the overall cloud scene.

We are also witnessing a big appetite for and a greater understanding among customers around Hybrid Cloud. Companies are adopting a mix of innovative solution that will run in the public cloud and historical legacy applications that will be put upon a private cloud to draw greater benefits.

The model provides a competitive advantage to organizations as it enables them to transparently move workloads between the in-house cloud and the public cloud without re-working any key business functions or up-front capital expenditures.

What’s Oracle’s strategy to be the number one vendor in the cloud computing space? Do you have any timeline for that?
We are going to be the number one Cloud company and very soon. I say this with confidence basis the extraordinary growth we are witnessing in our cloud sales over the last few quarters as compared to other cloud vendors.

Last fiscal SaaS & PaaS bookings had grown more than 200%. We added over 1400 new PaaS customers; over 1200 new SaaS customers and over 760 customers expanded their Oracle footprint. So even if you look at this mechanically, we are going to become the number one cloud vendor very soon.

Unlike our competitors who offer SaaS only, virtualization only, or hardware only, we have almost all our solutions on the cloud --applications, middleware or database.

We are the only vendor to offer customers the choice from our complete cloud portfolio. Be it SaaS, PaaS or IaaS – these are all available in a private cloud set up or public cloud or even as a hybrid cloud. We allow companies to move from on premise to cloud and vice versa. This is especially required for companies that operate in a highly regulated environment.

How important is India market from a cloud investment point of view? What is Oracle’s strategy to fuel growth in the country?
From a cloud opportunity perspective, we are seeing accelerated business growth in India pegged on a growing demand from customers for our solutions. Our strategy is to focus on all companies that want to innovate with cloud. These could be our large customers that want to take advantage of the flexibility, agility, and financial opportunities the public and private cloud presents. They could also be midsize firms who now are displaying eagerness and readiness to invest in new technologies to power their businesses.

Addressing public, private, and hybrid clouds allows us to offer software to new customers that previously may have considered Oracle software unattainable for various reasons — concerns about complexity, cost, skills, or other reasons.

For private cloud solutions, our strategy is to fill the white-space accounts with cloud capabilities in the core products that we currently do not own and to expand the base. 

We already work with midsize firms who have aspirations to compete in the global marketplace and some of these include Cloud implementations. This will give them an edge as they go to market and build their business.

Earlier this year we launched a program called “Rainmaker’ to hire 1000 sales professionals across Asia Pacific, who would be dedicated towards selling Oracle cloud.

Nearly 300 of these were in India. The program has been extraordinarily successful and we achieved our target much earlier. Currently we are busy training the new employees.

What is your view on ‘Digital India’ and how you plan to partner with India government?
We are very bullish about India. We believe that with the ‘Digital India’ initiative, the country can leapfrog some of the older economies and really become a cloud nation which is completely digital. We believe that this initiative will completely transform the way things happen here - not only in terms of the citizen-government relationship but also the way businesses run here.

So, we are very excited, engaged and committed about the initiative. We have already partnered with a few government entities on different initiatives.

Top Government ministries are already on Oracle and we work with 20 states around treasury management, education, cloud, police modernisation, etc.

Top ministries in the government are already running on Oracle. We already work with 20 states in different shapes and forms. We are working on treasury management, education, cloud infrastructure, social relationship management, police modernisation and more.

What are Oracle’s investment areas going forward?
Training and developing employees is our main focus going forward. We want to equip employees with the skill sets required to transform towards ‘Digital India’ and also help companies in the country modernise and leverage cloud in their journey. This is a huge investment that we are making in the region and we will just continue executing on this. 

Can you name two reasons why Oracle cloud business will move fast in the coming days?
The recruitment and the training that we are doing will really help us accelerate in our cloud business. Also, we believe that the breadths of our portfolios and the strengths of our strategy will help us accelerate and this really resonates well with our customers here.

When we talk about the completeness of a solution from SaaS, PaaS and IaaS and the fact that we can offer it in public cloud, private cloud and we can offer a hybrid solution, this completely resonates well.

We will continue to invest in people, in R&D and that is what will help us grow.