Indian SMBs, startups ride on Oracle Cloud to weather pandemic

After spending over seven months in uncertainty around the pandemic-induced lockdowns, there has been an uptick in business sentiment in India and a vast number of small and medium businesses (SMBs) and startups are now turning to the Oracle second generation cloud infrastructure for high performance and growth, a top Oracle India executive said on Saturday.

From an overall market perspective, most organisations are keen now more than ever to transform into digital-first businesses. According to Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India, they are seeing increased demand for Cloud services from organisations of all sizes to not only weather the current crisis but also be prepared for a digital future.

"Buoyed by rising Cloud demand and to aid better disaster recovery and regulatory compliance, we made our second local cloud region available to customers just a few months ago. Our cloud business is growing well and is on the right track," Kumar told IANS.

A recent Nasscom report forecast that the Indian cloud computing market is currently valued at $2.2 billion and is expected to grow at 30 per cent (year-on-year) to reach $7.1 billion by 2022.

Nearly 50 million SMBs and startups in the country have a key role to play in the Cloud adoption.

"Some of these SMBs include RXIL, ARCIL, Lipi Data Systems, SImeio, Hyreo, Aindra Systems and Gnani.AI, among others, which have turned to Oracle Cloud," Kumar said.

Another key growth driver for Oracle in the country is independent software vendors (ISVs). The industry analysts expect ISVs to play an important role in helping organisations to accelerate/expand cloud adoption.

"As a trend, we`re already observing increased cloud usage driven by ISVs delivering their cloud-based SaaS offerings in turn to their customers on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)," the Oracle executive informed. By moving to OCI, a number of ISVs are already gaining extreme performance, robust edge to core security as well as superior cloud economics, which in turn is benefiting their customers significantly. Jocata is a Hyderabad-based fintech company that helps financial institutions run smoother by reducing overheads, automating processes and ensuring compliance against the backdrop of increasingly demanding consumer needs as well as complicated regulatory requirements.

"By moving to OCI, we overcame these challenges and clocked 40 per cent better application performance, achieved better security and significantly better TCO (total cost of ownership), along with better support," Sundari Vedula, CTO, Jocata, told IANS.

Bengaluru-based IBS Infotech, a mid-size company, offers treasury risk management solutions.

"We selected OCI for its enterprise-grade features such as superior performance, ease of migration, advanced security, high scalability and autonomous capabilities", said CM Grover, MD and CEO, IBS Infotech.

"Further, Oracle`s Bring Your Own License (BYOL) feature helped us save significantly on license costs. As a result, we`ll be able to help our `Treasury on cloud` customers realise more value and faster performance," he added.

Oracle said it has worked closely with customers to help them keep their businesses up and running, helping them quickly respond to different challenges they may be facing during the current challenging situation.

"In addition, we`ve enabled customers with free access to online learning and certification, as well as a free HR tool to help keep their employees safe," Kumar told IANS.

The company has also provided free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) credits for startups part of `Oracle for Startups` programme, Kumar said.

The story has been taken from a news agency