The Cloud Pitch

At Oracle Openworld 2012, Larry Ellison detailed out the elements of Oracle's cloud strategy (See Box: Oracle is all cloud). The company began the year with a multicity roadshow, Oracle CloudWorld, across the globe. Stopping by Dubai, Los Angeles, and Sydney, CloudWorld came to Mumbai in April.

Sandeep Mathur, managing director, Oracle India hosted ClouldWorld in Mumbai. He said, "The India marketplace is absolutely ready for large scale cloud adoption and we look forward to supporting our customers in their business transformation journeys."

Sandeep detailed out Oracle's overall strategy comprising four elements:

Offering the best-of-breed technology at every layer of the enterprise stack

Vertically integrating across the layers of enterprise stack

Having cloud capabilities across various layers including applications

Delivering cloud-based applications in industry-specific areas as well as emerging areas like social media, analytics, mobile and such.

David Vap, group VP, Oracle Applications, in his keynote said that cloud has enabled the new era of utility computing and Oracle has significantly played across all levels of cloud-infrastructure, platforms, and applications. Oracle's cloud solutions include public cloud, private cloud, managed cloud services, and hybrid cloud. Oracle's cloud application services covers HCM services (Fusion HCM), sales and marketing servies (Fusion CRM), ERP services (Fusion ERP), customer experience services (RightNow), and talent management services (Taleo).

At Oracle CloudWorld Mumbai, Oracle also demoed new breed solutions in social relationship management, mobility, procurement, amongst others.

Under platform services, Oracle's offerings included web services, database services, and Java/Weblogic services. The three new platform services that were previewed at CloudWorld include storage services, developer services, and messaging services. Analytics and collaboration services would be previewed in the coming few months.

SaaS applications are hot. Oracle claimed that in terms of its combined market share in ERP, SCM, ad CRM, it is growing faster than the market. The growth drivers in the applications business are Fusion HCM, Fusion CRM, RightNow, and Taleo. Similarly, Eloqua, Vitrue, and SelectMinds are also popular.

The Indian travel website Makemytrip uses Oracle customer experience application. The company is seeing rapid adoption of CRM and HCM solutions in the SaaS mode. Applications delivered in the SaaS mode have an interesting dynamic. It allows the vendor to directly go to the business user or function owner. In the case of on-premise application, one had to go to IT and the discussion often veered towards whether the software is part of the IT strategy or not. More often, the discussions diverge to issues about underlying hardware, access mechanisms, deployment plans and such. Saas based software directly takes one to business functions and not be mired in technology debates.

Other key Oracle customers include Flipkart, TataSky, CRMIT, bookmyshow.com, Deepak Nitrite, WNS, Mahindra Comviva, Mahindra Logistics, and Wipro amongst others.