Oracle unveiled a plethora of cloud, data, and innovation updates at its CloudWorld 2022 expo held in Las Vegas last month.
Among the notable highlights included the launch of Oracle Alloy, a new cloud infrastructure platform that allows Oracle’s partners to introduce new cloud services to their customers; the introduction of MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse to process and query hundreds of terabytes of data; the addition of 15 baselines artificial intelligence (AI) models to Oracle Unity, and introduction of an array of healthcare-focused updates to its Cloud Fusion suite.
Deepa Param Singhal, Vice President, Cloud Applications, Oracle India in this interaction with ET Insights shares its growth story in the country; how it has been able to reduce the cost of doing business; enabled efficiency for its customers and the industry impact from the latest announcements at CloudWorld. Excerpts:
How has been Oracle’s business growth in the last year, especially around enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer experience (CX), and human capital management (HCM)?
India has turned out to be the fastest-growing region within JAPAC for our SaaS business, delivering double-digit growth year-on-year across all areas in FY22.
Overall, the Fusion applications business in India has grown 50 percent YoY in FY22. We are expecting it to grow further in the next financial year.
The ERP business specifically has been the leading growth driver in India, showing 70 percent YoY growth in FY22. Our CX solutions have made 55% YoY business growth, followed by HCM which has contributed with 15% YoY growth in the last fiscal year.
Public sector partnerships and the BFSI sector are rapidly adding to our growth in CX, specifically in India. To cater to the needs of the public sector, we are localizing our applications platforms. Our CX Unity platform recently went live in our India Data centres to meet the needs of PSUs and organizations operating in regulatory markets. We have also localized our HR Payroll solution to address the HR requirements of public sector enterprises.
Will it be right to state that Oracle has outpaced the market and acquired market share from the competition over the last year or so? If yes, what have been the key factors that enabled you to perform better than the competition?
Answering the second part of your question, our applications run on the best technology and are unbeatable. Our next-generation cloud infrastructure, designed with Fusion Applications is the only public cloud that offers performance, security, and availability to run any organization’s mission-critical operations. No one else offers such an integrated package of both applications and infrastructure.
We have natively built our SaaS applications that allow us to add multiple new features in each product area, during every single quarter, for all our customers. With 37 cloud regions worldwide and plans to reach 44 by the end of this calendar year, we have been making rapid expansions as compared to any major cloud provider.
On the other side, the most significant offering is that Oracle’s end-to-end portfolio begins with a complete suite of best-of-breed applications across Finance, Human Resources, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, Sales, Service, and Marketing. In addition to that, we have industry-specific applications to deliver end-to-end industry-specific transactional systems.
All our SaaS customers over the last year have moved to our Gen2 cloud infrastructure. With a brand-new version of literally everything from the data center on up, including the hardware and software to support the applications, our customers never have to worry about technical debt. These factors have enabled us to perform better.
Many enterprises face a challenge in terms of connecting with customers on their terms and creating personalized experiences at scale. How has Oracle been dealing with such concerns? What kind of flexibility and personalization can enterprise users expect from the new announcements made at the recently concluded Oracle CloudWorld 2022?
We have been extremely focused on providing personalized solutions depending on business needs. To tackle business challenges, harness cloud capabilities, and contribute to digital transformation in any sector, we have made continuous efforts to deliver new solutions that are purpose-built for businesses to cater to their customers’ demands. Conversations are happening around how solutions can be standardized with levels of personalization for businesses operating across industries.
At the Oracle CloudWorld held between October 17–20, 2022, we made diverse launches to our Applications platform that allows our customers and partners to leverage the same tools that our developers use to extend and personalize applications to meet their specific needs.
Similarly, we also launched the B2B Commerce Suite, a collection of native banking, financing, and logistics applications that will integrate and automate end-to-end business-to-business (B2B) transactions like purchasing, sales orders, financing, and shipping to billing and payments. Oracle Cloud ERP customers will be able to embed banking and logistics services into the platform for B2B transactions. The initial rollout of Oracle B2B Commerce will include integrations with JPMorgan for finance and FedEx for logistics.
For the healthcare and pharma sector, we introduced customized healthcare-oriented features to our Fusion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain and Manufacturing (SCM), and Human Capital Management (HCM) suites.
We also launched Oracle Recruiting Booster as part of our HCM applications suite. The solution is centered around the recruitment and selection needs of our customers and extends our recruiting capabilities, giving recruiters more ways to engage with job seekers and improving the interview process.
You spoke about healthcare where cloud-based applications have played a key role in the transformation of the sector in the past couple of years. Oracle acquired Cerner, a healthcare IT provider, in December 2021, marking its largest acquisition since that of cloud applications company NetSuite. Going forward, what can healthcare companies expect from Oracle to improve patient care?
We were aware that healthcare was ready for change. The pandemic amplified and accelerated the readiness to see that change. Healthcare organizations are relying heavily on technological capabilities and data science tools and they are finding new ways to improve patient treatment and care. Technologies such as AI/ML, etc., are leading the change to make business processes faster, and agile, and reframe solutions for health and well-being.
We are partnering with customers across the industry to explore and develop new approaches to modernizing data collection, management, and analysis in cloud environments to embrace AI technologies.
Our partnership with Cerner is a testament to our strategy to redefine the future of healthcare. With this partnership, we see that a new generation of applications combining Cerner’s clinical capabilities with Oracle’s enterprise platform, analytics, and automation expertise will change health and wellness in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before.
We want to provide secure and reliable solutions that deliver health insights and experiences to dramatically change how health is managed by patients, providers, and payors. The healthcare industry has never been riper for change.
Moving into 2023, what will be Oracle’s Go-To-Market strategy and growth priorities?
We have observed the growing trend where organizations are adopting a “cloud only” strategy instead of “cloud first”. There has been an increasing reliance on modern applications to streamline the finance, human resources, supply chain, commerce, marketing, sales, and services functions. Emerging technologies like AI, ML, and data analytics are playing a vital role to deliver efficiency, innovation, and performance to organizations.
In India, our long-term growth strategy for the SaaS market is to capitalize on our ongoing momentum through consistent innovations. With the ongoing trends, we are optimistic about the revenue generation from our applications business. The growth strategy for FY23 is aligned with the government’s vision and we are banking on the public sector.
As we analyze the demand, the public sector market appears a significant industry for us as we focus on the localization of our products and solutions in India. Moving forward, we expect our cloud business to grow even further. We have put together a dedicated team within the SaaS space to work across businesses that primarily cater to the public sector demand and ensure fast-paced growth.