Innovation on the data front helps CXO to take action and decision

Today's business leaders are spending millions on digital tools, agile processes, and lean strategies in order to remain competitive. Every business will have distinct objectives, and every business will have a different reason for moving to the cloud. In this interview, P Saravanan, Vice President, Cloud Engineering, Oracle India discusses insights around cloud adoption in India.

How is cloud driving innovation for Indian business? And can you please reveal some insights around cloud adoption in India?

Saravanan: We see a lot of traction on the cloud adoption perspective.  Our consumption business is growing almost double every year, that shows the traction in the Indian business. The customers have started adopting digital the DX journey and that becomes across the board, across industries and is a must to go. Which part of the journey you start with it may vary. Somebody starts from the core, and somebody starts from the front end applications. But when we look at the DX, it's all about the cloud. I would say the motion we are experiencing, and we are witnessing as well. So a couple of years ago, we started off with the move motion, which is the code moving to the cloud. When they move to cloud, it also modernizes, and you become more and more I would say optimized to cater to the business demand. 

Now when we move to the move motion, which is very successful for us, like large customers, Cognizant is one such, who moved their complete ERP to OCI and that caters to 3,40,000 employees.  We have some companies like IFFCO a fertilizer company moved their ERP to the cloud. Likewise, many large customers have migrated their ERP to cloud, some of them migrated the dealer management system to cloud, but when they move the motion, what happens, you move the entire core to the cloud and that cools the other option and you build innovation in them.  

Innovation on the data front where you build the analytics, and  a real time visualization layer, helps the CXO to take some action, and some decision, at the same time build certain report, which will help the layer below to do what is next to the custom companies, right, that is helping us in a big way. Whoever the customer we move to, now in the process of adopting the analytics in the cloud. That's clearly action we are seeing it  When we look at where innovation is happening , there are also a lot of other things that get pulled. When they do this visualization, analytics, they're also building the AI and ML based algorithms, for certain specific use cases, sometimes they adopt to startup to address a specific problem and sometimes they build their own logic to understand what is happening in the call center, what happens in the bot ecosystem, and how they can embed . Gone are the days where I lift and shift to the cloud. Now it is all how I lift, I shift, how much I modernize, how much I automate, how much I innovate. which makes my business to realise the benefit and how we can use it. That's the part which we're looking at it

How do you assure the security?

Saravanan: Security is one of the part of our DNA. Starts from the time we build the database is for CA, if we looked at Oracle database, four decades ago, it's for the CA, the database is built on that. Then it becomes commercialized so even in the cloud when we build from the bottom up, security is the fundamental element embedded into each and every service. We can proudly say, from the core to the edge, every service we launch security service is embedded into it. What it means to a customer- we embedded the zero trust architecture, which means, by default, anything in the DNA. 

For instance, somebody says this is the endpoint to be connected, to this service and the first model to follow is zero trust architecture, don't trust anybody. The second aspect is we built is our own cloud. And we built a red team and blue team, who continuously monitor the cloud, and identify what are the vulnerabilities? What are the things that are happening and take some actions on a real time basis. So those are the two things which help us y security becoming in the DNA or security becoming the most important element for every service we launch in OCI.

When it comes to cost, CIO’s sometimes doesn't understand how do you justify the cloud cost in comparison to the on prem?

Saravanan: What we are observing and also hearing from many customers, who have adopted cloud much earlier and estimate there is a certain cost for this workflow to move it is, let's say this much cost, but by the end of the move, it becomes 1.2 to 1.3 times the cost.

Can you share some details around the latest updates on Oracle products and solutions including MySQL?

Saravanan:  MySQL is our game changing product. This is one of the widest adopted databases across every sector, be it a startup, Telecom, be it a FSI, be it a government. They use MySQL largely. We took this product and added more and more elements. We launched a feature called Heatwave is it basically you run the database on both OLTP and analytics on a single instance and tells customers no need to have one more instance for analytics and that Heatwave option give customers practically, 8000 times increment. If you refer to one of our key executives' presentations on MySQL, she’s done a benchmark, and shows a 149 times improvement on a same MySQL runs on a different cloud provider. 

What we are doing is with our multi cloud as a strategy, we are giving this Heatwave embedded in in AWS, so the customers who are running MySQL on AWS, they can use a Heatwave e, take the advantage of the performance improvement, without any core change, without any change of the data, and they can get the benefit out of it.  Our goal is to embrace Multi cloud and such technologies like MySQL, with Heatwave with autopilot, enables them in other providers, so the customer can take benefit out of it.

How did you come up with the idea of Heatwave?

Saravanan: Most of the time customer runs the critical or core in the, MySQL To process the data, do some visualization or  analysis, they have to move the data to a different database, which is another MySQL platform, and then do analysis and that involves your data movement, which means you don't have real time, to some tools to move the data, which means you embark on some  cost, Three, you are moving the data so there's hidden costs attached to it. Right? 

We felt there is no need of doing all this and we have enabled Heatwave, which is the analytics portion of it within the same database and can cater to the need. That's the innovation behind this. We built it in OCI, we shown the performance, and now we are adopting it to other providers as well, so that the customer can see and take advantage of it.

How is Oracle supporting businesses with its automation database? And what are the key benefits?

Saravanan: Autonomous is again, another game changer product, when you look at adopting a core ERP or any large system, there will be continuous optimization, interface optimization, it is about performance, fine tuning the query, creating all of our indexes to make it faster backup, how sure am I this database is secured. Up to date on all the patch levels, all the security patches on how I’m ensuring that this database has another copy in another region so that I don't have any single point of failure. 

There are a lot of I would say manual tasks involved, right and that becomes more and more tedious, complex. If we look at logically, this can be completely automated  a person can do something innovative or can work towards a business, solving business problems. That's exactly where Autonomous was born where machine learning algorithms, based on our four decades of experience are embedded into this to automate all the task. It's like an Autonomous car, you sit there, put your  destination, say start and it goes. 

Similarly, you build a database, and database has to deliver certain performance, always security to be up to date, and it has to have availability 99.999. That's about it, it does everything at the backend. As you move and continue to grow it fine tunes That's the model on which Oracle is moving towards. 

What are the key value proposition for customers in India?

Saravanan: We are embarking into the 30th year of presence in India. India is a strategic part of it. Literally  with our database products, we  are with almost all the customers be it a central government, state government, financial institutions, manufacturing, telco, large wide install base. But now with the cloud, we are going back to the same customers and see how and showcasing the value and taking them to the cloud gen. India is very strategic for us and be it any large scale projects, or  tax department or the learning management solutions or prime ministers’ aspirational districts everything we have a contribution there they use our technology to take advantage of data. 

How do you back up the data? 

Saravanan: We have two regions in India, one in Bombay, others in Hyderabad both are MeitY empaneled. Both regions are equipped to service any customer in India as data per se will be residing within the  India and customer can choose okay I am posting it up in Bombay, my data can be backed up in Hyderabad. Customers in Hyderabad can say that I am posting it of Hyderabad for redundancy and we can back it up in Bombay data center.  We are enabling the technology but  it is completely the customer's responsibility to have a copy locally, or other regional as well. But from our perspective,  data is particular to the region, no data moves outside the region.

What are the factors for the growth of digital infrastructure?

Saravanan: From the Outlook perspective, we see a lot of traction on the digital public infrastructure. That is where the government is focusing on. Enabling digital to all the citizens be it Digi locker, to put an example. There'll be a lot of action happening in that space. Next best action would happen in Logistics and ONDC which is digital currency, next one. All of them are underlined with technology as it plays an important role. 

Technology is going to be built for adoption of mass scale deployment and that's where the cloud technology plays an important. So, we believe, with our  Oracle Cloud infrastructure, with the basic tenets of performance security, and I will say economics, we can really add more value to the DPGs and DPIs of government products.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Saravanan: We see a lot of traction in two other industries. I would say one is the Cooperative and the NBFCs. With recent RBI’s push towards every cooperative banks to be core banking, so adopt the core banking technology and even NBFC can do it and these customers are more, I would say are more prone to tech cloud, they're more open, as they are cloud born cooperative bank. The other one is in the startup space, primarily on AI and ML, that is seeing a huge traction. Everybody is building their software. And all they need is a cloud power, which is where Oracle is clearly a game changer for it. The other element I can see is the Multi cloud adoption. As I said, many times when many of the customers started the journey much earlier - some of them have started or may still be in the same place or some of them are in the middle of it, right.  Gone are the days where the walled gardens are moving away, we will enable multi cloud that's one of the reasons why the MySQL heatwave is available in AWS. Similarly, VMware, we have a VMware persona on OCI. So that helps the customer not to change the workload and more it directly to the OCI. So Multi Cloud becomes a common factor. 

Any message for CIOs to choose the right technology for their business.?

Saravanan: What we have seen and what CIO evaluates primarily, or one is the, when they look at the cloud, they look at more about how I can move my workload or pick up my workload with the least disruption. And how much the cloud vendor has skin in the game, in my cloud journey. 

This is an important aspect. The second aspect is security, how my CSO will be happy after moving to the cloud. Third most important is whatever estimate the cost, is it the same, is it going to increase? And that's where Oracle really have a game changing product. 

We enable customers to move and we provide our lift services, where our own people, help our  to move to the cloud. At the same time, we have something called service support reward program, wherein customers are using, paying support to the database, we give them every $1 they spend, we give them 33 cents as a rebate. 

Which means he spends only 0.67 for every $1 of consumption. Obviously, security becomes the foundation for us and it is more imperative for them. These are the two three elements, which every CIO is evaluating, and we see a play there. I think I would request every CIO to evaluate these parameters from long term perspective.