We have amplified our sales force to tap into's India's rapidly growing cloud market: Niraj Kaushik, Oracle India

In an interaction with Dataquest, Niraj Kaushik, Vice President - Applications Business, Oracle India, reveals the company’s strategic plans to capture the growing opportunities in the Indian cloud market.

Tell us more about your plans for the Indian Cloud market?

Cloud computing is driving a significant part of our product development plans—from enterprise applications to middleware, databases, servers and storage devices, as well as cloud management systems. The technology solutions we offer enable organizations to build private clouds, leverage public clouds, and provide cloud services to others. The company hosts and manages the world’s largest Oracle cloud, powering a combination of public and private clouds on behalf of thousands of Oracle customers and more than 5 mn users.

Our strategy is to ensure that cloud computing is fully enterprise grade. Secondly, we support both public and private clouds to give a choice to our customers. Our focus is also on developing and enabling rich SaaS offerings— we offer a very broad portfolio of horizontal and industry applications that are deployed in either a private shared services environment or in a public SaaS model. Further, we are hiring sales cloud professionals in India to beef up our sales team and go after the opportunity in the market here.

What do you think will be the biggest opportunity areas in the Indian cloud market?
Cloud computing has been the buzzword across all industry domains for some time now. It has been consistently attracting investments in the BFSI, manufacturing, communication, government, and public administration segments.
We are seeing tremendous momentum in industries like professional services, eCommerce, start-ups, industrial manufacturing, engineering & construction, financial services, and automotive. In addition to these, we are also working on some projects for the government and some city-specific and department-specific social relationship management (SRM) projects. We are having discussions on smart cities front as well.
Primarily, we are seeing demand across three segments, large transformational where the companies are going end-to-end replacing human capital management, ERP, customer experience led by marketing cloud, service cloud, etc, and then extending through PaaS and infrastructure. Examples include companies like BirlaSoft, Airtel Bharti, Apollo Hospital, Jabong, and Flipkart.

Can you highlight the key elements of Oracle's cloud strategy ? 
Oracle has its focus firmly on the cloud. We have amplified our sales force by recruiting 300 people to support our cloud sales efforts. We are not just adding people but are also ensuring that they are specialized and trained, so that they can talk to the right people in the right language. We are also investing in ‘Customer Success Managers.’

For every cloud sale that takes place, a customer success manager is designated to ensure once the account is provisioned, the customer can successfully deploy and use the service without any hassle. Their job is to make sure that the customer goes through this entire journey smoothly, derive the maximum value out of the product, and ultimately renew at the end of the year. India has been an incredibly important and significant market for us in terms of our employees and also the endmarket opportunities. India can and should be number one in Asia-Pacific. Cloud market is growing rapidly in India and we are planning to hire more than 300 sales executives to tap into this growth. We are beefing up our sales force and new sales executives would be part of cloud teams, created under each of our five existing business units.

We are also partnering with a number of cloud companies in India, wherein the partners will integrate our offerings with their own and also resell some of our cloud products. We started our geographical expansion beyond metro cities some three years back and are today seeing great uptake from cities like Hyderabad, Pune, and Kolkata.