Oracle bets big on hybrid cloud offering to drive business

Oracle is betting on its cloudbased services and claims cloud migration is often “misunderstood” as only a cost-saving option.

The US-based software firm said its pitch for a hybrid offering of running or moving back to an onpremise technology service was resonating with customers and many were moving from rival cloud providers where the total cost of operations exceeded the initial cost.

Some of the customers had realised that movement of business operations to the cloud was beyond cost saving, said Mitesh Agarwal, CTO, Oracle India. “Our competitors told them all you will save cost; some of them had fallen into that argument trap,” he added.

IT research firm Gartner has forecast the public cloud services market in India to be worth $1.8 billion in 2017. The cloud services market is shared among Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and others.

Agarwal said the cloud services requirements for enterprises were different from a small firm.

“Businesses have now started realising that the movement to the cloud is primarily for agility and transformation. As enterprises do not operate like a startup, only cost is not the right approach. Some of the global players who came to India did not understand local market requirements. The cost aspect never worked in India,” Agarwal said.

“It is okay to have Netflix stream from the cloud, it is not okay for them to have e-business on the cloud. We are seeing a lot more core applications movement,” he added.

Big business organisations or public sector undertakings expect their cloud migration to be secure and not shared on a common data storage platform. Oracle said it was capitalising on this demand for dedicated infrastructure.

“The moment the customer is ready to move to the cloud we can do it easily. That is the design decision we took, given our large licence business,” Agarwal said.

“BUSINESSES HAVE NOW STARTED REALISING THAT THE MOVEMENT TO THE CLOUD IS PRIMARILY FOR AGILITY AND TRANSFORMATION” Mitesh Agarwal CTO, Oracle India