DQ Leadership Series: Shailender Kumar, Oracle MD: 'We Are Approaching An Era Of Self-Driving Autonomous Software. This Is A Big Shift In It And We Are Leading It'

Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India takes a deep dive on the tech trends, its impact and Oracle’s growing clout in the Indian market. Excerpts

Q. If you reflect on FY 18, what is your overall view of the performance of the Indian ICT industry, given the social-political changes in the US and Europe and the digital disruption?

India’s GDP has bounced back to a growth rate of 7.2% and we have once again become the fastest growing economy in the world. We have overtaken many of the industrialized nations, including Russia, Canada, Korea, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Italy, to become the 6th largest economy in the world This is a testimony to our success and growth trajectory.

The Internet has been the biggest game changer and catalyst in our evolution and will continue to be the driving force for innovations in futuristic technology and in evolving the human race. At the same time, we are in the middle of a generational shift with computing heavily moving from traditional software deployment models to the cloud. You don’t realize it, but we are all benefitting from this advancement and from this evolution in IT in some form or other – as businesses or even as individual users/ beneficiaries of technology.

Furthermore, it is enabling collaboration and knowledge-sharing between academia, the business world, NGOs and the vast swathes of the Indian population that will most benefit from it — our farmers, rural entrepreneurs, and artisans.

The rate at which technology is evolving and bringing together people and nations, new and emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Robotics or Blockchain are permeating into nation building and these will be key for the success of India’s current development paradigm.

Q, How emerging tech is changing the entire outsourcing industry and do you see traditional verticals upping the ante by adopting newer tech?

Let me share how I see some of the emerging technologies playing a role in our world today, across businesses and sectors.

First, let me talk of ‘autonomous’. We are approaching an era of self-driving autonomous software. This is a big shift in IT and we are leading it. Let me tell you what is ‘autonomous’ and how different it is from ‘automation’. It’s like a self-driving car vs an automatic car. In an automatic car you need human intervention to drive the car, while in an autonomous car, it’s self-driving. That’s what we’re doing to the database – it’s self-driving, self-repairing, self-securing.

The biggest data thefts this world has seen is because of human error – we want to eliminate that completely. We want DBAs to be investing more time in analyzing data and be more valuable to the business. Oracle is using machine learning to revolutionize data management with the introduction of the world’s first autonomous database cloud, delivering more automation for more savings.

Then there is Blockchain. This securely extends business processes and applications while enabling customers to process business transactions much faster. We see tremendous opportunity for this in pharma, financial services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Oracle embeds AI across many of its business and technology services. In addition to Oracle AI Platform Cloud Service, which includes high-performance training and operational infrastructure, Oracle embeds ready-to-use AI and machine-learning capabilities across Oracle’s SaaS, PaaS, and IOT services, including cognitive AI, analytics, data services, IT management, and security operations.

Machine Learning (ML): Oracle Machine Learning is a SQL notebook interface for data scientists to perform machine learning in the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud (ADWC).

Intelligent bots or Chatbots: Oracle Intelligence Bots enable sensing of user sentiment/emotion, translation of language and many more cognitive capabilities. The infusion of new technology like Autonomous, Blockchain, Chatbots, IoT or Artificial Intelligence among others, is going to dominate our world. In fact, as per some of our research, virtual reality and chatbots are expected to dominate brand interactions by 2020 – that’s in just two years! Ten years back cloud was just a buzzword and it’s taken so long for it to come to the mainstream. See how rapidly and explosively cloud adoption is ruling our world. We predict that by 2020:

• 50-percent of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously.
• 80-percent of application and infrastructure operations will be resolved autonomously. Security will move from job 10 to job 1. Cloud providers will add on-premises controls—or miss out on mission-critical workloads.
• Regulated industries will migrate to the cloud en masse. AI will cement its place in the enterprise. The majority of customer support interactions will be conducted by chatbots. IoT will evolve from individual components to an integrated platform. Blockchain will be the disruptive standard in modern commerce.

On Oracle’s Cloud play

Fifteen years back cloud was known to support storage & compute needs i.e IaaS. Now, the cloud tech market and the market for appetite i.e customer demands, have changed so much. IaaS alone is not enabling companies to innovate and succeed. They need PaaS to accelerate app development and go to market faster. They need SaaS that has adaptive intelligence capabilities like AI or ML to power/ transform their business. During all this time we were preparing for our customers and are able to offer cloud tech across all platforms IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.

That’s why, today, Oracle Cloud powers 25000+ customers in 175 countries, processes 61 billion transactions per day and manages 1075+ petabytes of data.

In India, Oracle Cloud is empowering thousands of our customers across large and midsize firms.

On the priorities

In the new year, our strategic priorities in India will focus on the following:

• Growing our cloud business
• Growing our volume business (Though our new Digital Sales business unit)
• Transform our sales culture (we’re going through a massive transformation as a corporation, and that influences our way of operating)

Our focus on these priorities has helped us build a strong foundation for the overall growth and continued success in India.