SMBs can now adopt, grow and scale up like never before

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are meant to support any economy. SMBs are the most vulnerable when it comes to data protection, but they also have a soft side. Therefore, these businesses' required investments in data security technologies like cloud computing would always be highly profitable. The SMBs are gradually moving in the direction of widespread technological use. 

Shabeer Kozhakkaniyil, Cloud Senior Sales Director, Oracle India, how they are enabling them to migrate and modernize applications, lower costs, and improve security and speed to market. 

Can you share some insights about the cloud adoption in SMBs in India?

SMB businesses for Oracle Cloud is actually the fastest growing. Over the last three years, the SMB business has grown more than 100% and now it has become a very significant part of overall Oracle Portfolio, and specifically for cloud. 

Over the last couple of years, let's say, post COVID, the adoption in SMB has increased, because a lot of the companies are coming back to their growth trajectory. They would want to rapidly scale and the digital natives as well as the startup mission is also part of that. There is a lot of support and push by the government in terms of policies to help them and Oracle is also working very closely with the SMBs to help them reach that goal. A couple of insights is, the SMBs that are actually adopting cloud at a much faster pace, they also want high agility as well as they don't want to have huge infrastructure expenses, that's some of the insights if you ask me, rapid growth, agility as well as you know, lesser inertia in terms of technology adoption.

How are you enabling your customers in their cloud journey?

If you look at Oracle, in cloud, we started two state of the art data centers, one in Mumbai and one in Hyderabad. We worked with the government to get them both MeitY certified, and we are adhering to all the basic security as well as compliance which is required by demanding industries like NBFCs, banking, manufacturing. 

In addition to that, our differentiated Gen 2 architecture helps SMBs to achieve rapid growth as well as achieve scalability at a much lesser cost. We have understood what are some of the pitfalls of Generation One hyperscalers, we came up with our generation two architecture, which is much more robust, which is faster and built with security as the primary focus. In addition to that, this is also available at a much lower cost and price point for SMBs. Three things one is SMBs want rapid adoption, they don't want to wait. SMBs are the ones who would like to squeeze the maximum out of their budget. 

Oracle Cloud is hitting that sweet spot, and that's also when the industry is growing at a certain pace, Oracle Cloud is beating that by at least three to four times. So, just a classic example, our business is growing at more than 100% and we have close to 15,000 customers in India, which has actually doubled from last year and we are the new logo or customer acquisition venture. The enterprise accounts are already working with existing Oracle customers. So, they you know, they are… there they look at big bigger projects, expansion, we work on getting new logos.

How long it takes them to move to Oracle cloud?

Cloud is actually a journey, we follow the option of adopt and grow. We go to the customer, talk to them about what is it that we are doing. Let's say a typical customer in SMB will have some very small workloads on premise, some of them will have already tied up with maybe two or three hyperscalers. What we go and ask them is, are you happy with them? Are you facing any pain points, they say that there are performance pain points, some will say that cost is a pain point. So with Oracle Cloud, we ask them to adopt, we have an option wherein the customer can start with a small instance on a pay as you go model. Once they come and see within two to six months, they usually migrate completely. So then once they see it happening, so generally what happens, let's say if you're a CIO, once you implement, you'd say that it's working fine. The biggest thing is at the end of the month, when they see the bill, they realise that it is cost effective as well. There are often times, I'm just giving specific example. UpGrad campus was on, again, a competing Hyperscaler, they were spending close to about $100K. Because of the nature of their workload, they had to access a lot of data from the web, we call it egress and egress is charged by all hyperscalers. 

Oracle is only hyperscaler, which offers 10 terabytes of egress free, per month, so when they moved to Oracle, which looked at it after a month, the bill came down by 80%. CIO was surprised, he was flabbergasted if there is something missing? I said no nothing is missing. You try for one more month. At the end of the second month, he was convinced. Just one simple example. And everywhere is the same story.

What are the key sectors benefitting?

One of the key sector which we are now focusing are the startup community, digital natives, and those Edtechs and Fintechs.  which we are now having a dedicated team, who will be driving this. Second important sector is the manufacturing. Third is, very important one the Cooperative banks and the NBFCs. Then it's a mixed bag, these are the ones which are mainly we have retail, wholesale utilities, etc. 

SMBs are growing in the country, there is also an understanding of the benefits of cloud amongst them. How are the SMBs moving towards the cloud?

Why are SMBs moving, that’s the fundamental question. SMBs are those who has the aptitude as well as the wish to grow big, but a lot of times if you look at let's say, if you rewind, let's say 15-20 years back, a data warehousing project can only be afforded by either SBI or Hindustan Unilever or big company, because it required, truckloads of hardware, all kinds of software, upfront investment, an army of people from any of the largest large global SI and about two years, and it's again a hit and miss. 

Now it is not that. These technologies are available as a platform as a service on various hyperscalers. This is not just an Oracle thing. Today, if you want to set up a data warehouse, you can come to Oracle, with a click of a button, you can enable our autonomous data warehouse, which will spin up automatically. It is a self managed, self tuning and automatically scalable data warehouse which will run by itself. Once that is done, all you need is to put, understand your data models and start connecting to various data sources. Now SMBs are able to use those kinds of technologies, which is never in their grasp earlier. That is one point. Second is SMBs always have a problem of putting upfront investment in the form of capital expenses, because they might not have access to that kind of funds, they would need someone who's able to give an infrastructure, which they can start small. They can scale as they grow, and God forbid if something happens, they can exit fast. Cloud is a perfect way, so you have something called scalability and elasticity, which helps you adopt and grow and scale up. So two things mainly, one is the elasticity and scalability, cost effectiveness and access to those technologies, which was never possible before.