Cloud seeding: Oracle opens data centres for next-gen cloud in India

More than 15,000 customers in India are using Oracle to manage their mission-critical workloads.

At Oracle Open World in San Francisco last month, the company chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, made one bold announcement (among several others) to take competition head-on: to set up 20 new cloud data centres globally by the end of 2020. Giving concrete shape to its India expansion plans, a market where Oracle is seeing robust growth for its cloud services, the company has opened its Gen 2 Cloud region in Mumbai, with plans to open another region in Hyderabad next year. What this means is customers and partners in India can now harness the power of Oracle Cloud and its autonomous database to drive sustained business growth.

The announcement was made by Shailender Kumar, regional managing director of Oracle India in Mumbai last week, in the presence of Bhavesh Zaveri, country head—operations and technology, HDFC Bank; the bank is in advanced stages of discussion to migrate its UAT (user acceptance testing) environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the India datacentre. Once implemented, it will enable the bank’s different departments—be it loans, risk, underwriting, marketing, analytics among others, to test new services in the ‘real world’, thereby speeding their ability to upgrade existing products, and roll-out new products quickly to customers. It will allow the bank to provide digital banking access to many more citizens.

In recent months, a strong growth in cloud applications along with rising demand for its autonomous database offerings has given a major boost to Oracle’s cloud business. “Oracle Cloud is fast becoming a growth platform for both public and private sector enterprises worldwide. We are looking to open one region every 23 days, on an average, over the next 15 months,” said Philippe Mathieu, executive vice president, Oracle EMEA and JAPAC. “These two new cloud regions signify Oracle’s commitment to India, as the country looks to nearly double the size of its economy by 2025.”

Specifically architected for the most demanding needs of the enterprise, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure is a powerful platform for innovation, including Autonomous Database, AI-based applications, ML-integrated security, automated analytics, and a broad range of high performance cloud infrastructure services. By coupling this advanced infrastructure with the data management portfolio, customers are able to use their data to innovate, create new experiences, deliver differentiation, and understand their businesses better.

“Our Gen 2 Cloud is the only modern, secure, enterprise-grade cloud that provides customers a strong foundation to unlock innovation faster and drive new business growth. We’ll help customers migrate to Oracle Cloud seamlessly as they look to scale their business for the experience economy,” said Oracle India’s Shailender Kumar. “Over 100 customers have already signed up for the new cloud region, signifying the rising adoption of Oracle Cloud in India. We look forward to helping more customers transform into data-driven businesses, to help build India’s digital economy.”

More than 15,000 customers in India are using Oracle to manage their mission-critical workloads. Early adopters and customers that have already realised significant business benefits from Oracle Cloud include Federal Bank, TTK Healthcare, Harman Connected Services, Bajaj Electricals, Dorf Ketal Chemicals, Genpact, National Stock Exchange, AU Small Finance Bank, Ayuscare, and Safexpress, amongst others.

“With the new Oracle Cloud India regions, banks and financial institutions like ours will gain access to a flexible and secure cloud infrastructure. We’ll look to further improve our data analytics using the Oracle Autonomous Database to deliver more value to our customers,” said Shalini Warrier, COO, Federal Bank.

“The new local cloud regions by Oracle will empower more Indian businesses to take advantage of a modern cloud infrastructure and enable greater innovations in the country. By moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, TTK Healthcare has seen a huge increase in operational efficiencies—from simplified application management to improved availability and 3x performance improvement, faster processing of month-end workloads to increased cost savings and improved agility for creating test environments on the fly,” said Srikanth Ramaswamy, VP-Information Systems, TTK Healthcare.