Cloud has Become the Catalyst for a Host of Disruptive New Business Technologies

In an exclusive with Dataquest, Rajeev Mittal, Vice President- Systems at Oracle India, talks about the future of datacenters in India, what are the  latest technologies that drive change in businesses. Excerpts:

Q. What’s your take on the future of datacenters in India?

With enterprises increasingly looking to transition to the cloud, I believe the number of corporate owned datacenters will reduce and instead the number of datacenters by cloud providers will increase. The increase in datacenters will also be driven by certain industries which need to adhere to data residency/regulatory guidelines. Several industry and analyst reports corroborate this. According to Gartner, the datacenter market in India is expected to touch US$4.5 billion mark in 2018.

Q. What are the technologies you think can drive change in businesses?

Cloud has become the catalyst for a host of disruptive new business technologies, from chatbots and artificial intelligence to applied machine learning and blockchain – and businesses are using these to good effect to server their end customers better. From an IT operations point of view, it’s never been easier to use services—and optimize costs. Looking into the near future, I believe the managed computing model will continue to mature, delivering more of what enterprises need to complete their cloud transformation—for development, innovation, and operations. In short, organizations that have a near-term hybrid IT strategy and a long-term cloud-first approach will thrive in the digital economy.

Q. Explain Oracle’s Systems strategy. How does this align with the company’s overall Cloud strategy?

The rise in hybrid IT environments have given rise to more demand for hyper converged infrastructure in India. Oracle engineered systems go beyond ordinary converged infrastructure solutions to make Oracle Databases and Oracle Applications run better. No other converged infrastructure solution is purpose-built to run Oracle software. Oracle engineered systems not only help you get your infrastructure up and running quickly, but also offer dramatic performance gains, increased reliability and availability, reduced costs, and single-vendor support.

Our systems strategy is fully aligned to our overall cloud strategy, our enterprise grade cloud runs on our own IT infrastructure. Oracle has a truly customer-centric cloud strategy and we are the only company that can cloud-enable customers across all the cloud layers – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. Further, we can support a customer’s cloud journey irrespective of whichever stage the customer is in: via our on-premises cloud-ready infrastructure, public cloud and the unique cloud at customer solution suite.

Q. Tell us more about your unique ‘cloud at customer offering’

Our cloud at customer offers enterprises all the virtues of a public cloud (subscription based, scale when you want to, secure etc) but in the customer’s own datacentre, behind their firewall. In effect, Oracle Cloud at Customer provides customers with one platform from development through production with full workload portability, rapid application development across public and private clouds with no rewrite, and fully secure and compliant data, all at flexible subscription pricing. By using this, customers can stay in control of their data and its location.

A classic example is of State Bank of India (SBI). A long-standing Oracle customer, SBI was the first organization in the entire APAC region to adopt Oracle’s cloud at customer offering. SBI is currently using this for app-dev and UAT.

Q. What are your customers’ key challenges? How is Oracle helping them navigate these challenges?

Based on my meetings with several customers, it’s clear that they believe the move to the cloud is imminent. They also realize that they can’t do it in one go, and are adopting a phased approach. As such, Gartner expects hybrid cloud will become the most common form of cloud by 2020. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

Our strategy is to offer customers a seamless transition to the cloud because Oracle Cloud is built on the same technologies as Oracle engineered systems and uses the exact same operational model. Unlike traditional cloud players, we offer true choice to customers – be it the deployment model or the option to move workloads back and forth between on-premises and cloud environments.

Q. Can you share some examples of what kind of business benefits customers have realized with your solutions?

Berger Paints, one of India’s leading companies in the paints and emulsions business, was facing downtime issues with their legacy systems, causing an impact on their business. With Oracle’s engineered systems, they have now been able to stabilize their infrastructure and eliminate downtime.

Faced with complex maintenance cycles for their existing hardware, Jamia Millia Islamia chose Oracle solutions for the simplicity, performance and availability.

Another good example is of Management Development Institute (MDI), who were able to reduce IT costs and improve performance with Oracle solutions.

There are just a few examples of customers who’ve transformed their IT infrastructure and achieved unmatched business benefits with Oracle. The key aspect is Oracle’s cloud-ready infrastructure is optimized for today and ready for tomorrow’s move to the cloud. Think of it as cloud insurance, because all Oracle engineered systems consumption models are cloud-ready when you are.