BackThomas Kurian | Looking to accelerate growth in the cloud space
President of product development at Oracle Corp. says Digital India is a very bold, visionary, ambitious modernisation initiative
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Oracle is eyeing digital India opportunities in areas where the approach is still not based on open source, open standards and open API (Application Programming Interface) model such as security and social services, said Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle Corp., on the sidelines of an event held to announce its 10th product development centre in Gujarat on Thursday. Edited excerpts from an interview:
What are your plans on Digital India?
The government’s approach to Digital India is to have open source, open standard, open API model. How is Oracle aligning its strategy with Digital India? Is there going to be change in strategy?
There are number of areas where there is lack of open source. Take for example, enterprise financial management. There is no other solution with the capabilities that Oracle provides. While the government will certainly use open source software in certain areas in order to meet the deadlines that have been set for the programme, I think we have an opportunity to help them in variety of areas where open source solutions just don’t exist.
So you will look at areas where they don’t have open source approach?
Yes.
What about the rest of areas which are based on open source, open API, open standard approach? That makes a larger chunk of Digital India.
We have not ruled out anything. But we do believe that we have got a variety of solutions not just that are possible to enable social services, which have been used by many countries around the world. If you look at European Union, the US or Australia, we have run many government digital programme for those places. And, we have helped these organisation transform the way they deliver services to citizen. I am sure, the government of India which has very smart people appreciate the capabilities that we offered in these context around the world and will be happy to use some of our solutions.
What are the areas in which you are looking to work with the government?
I don’t want to comment on the specific initiatives, but whether it is around mobility, whether it is around information delivery or social services, we have got solutions, and obviously the discussions are on.
With the competition increasing in the Indian market, how do you plan to retain your market share?
One important thing that we always look at is how do we deliver the software capability to many more people. Historically, if you wanted to use Oracle software, you had to have a data centre, computer, storage, network and database administrators to operate. Now all you need is a browser. You can access all that from the cloud. So our focus has always been rather than looking for the competition, whether we can broaden the reach of our capability and that Oracle as a company should reach every company and every person. That’s a much larger business opportunity than only selling to companies who have the resources to have their own data centres, power, facilities and skilled people. So our focus in India is about getting the software in the hands of every company and every person in India. If you have a mobile phone, and have a browser on it, you can access Oracle. That was not the case two years back. That’s the transformative opportunity that we have in India.
What are your plans for research and development in India?
Today we announced that we are opening our 10th location in Gujarat in India. And, if you look at our history, we have grown in terms of number of employees in R&D every year. Last year we added 2,300 people. So you we see us continue to grow that. And it is largely driven by the fact that we have a lot of interesting projects like in areas of mobility, IoT (Internet of Things), cloud, big data, social software, net generation marketing automation software for people. We will hire roughly the same number of people if not more over the next one year. We have 36,000 people in product development and one third of that is in India.
What are your India plans, strategy and the vision?
First, organisationally, India is our second largest location outside the US. It is the only location in the world where we have every function in the company—be it product development, support, consulting, sales, every function. No other location has that. In product development, we have been here since 1994. It is our 21st year. We have grown substantially. Every year we grow faster than the year before. We see enormous promise in the technical talent in engineering schools here. Eighteen percent of our population is from engineering schools who have joined us directly out of college. Our vision in product development for India is very simple—we want India to help drive the transformation in our product portfolio as we build her product and services. And we see India leading that along with the US. On the business side, we would like India to grow faster than any other country in the world. We think it has enormous promise to do that given the GDP growth and all the new initiative that have been announced that have the potential to further accelerate the GDP growth.
The India strategy has certainly changed. Obviously, the Digital India initiative opens up brand new solution to offer in India in cooperation with the government and clearly that adds more emphasis on what we want to enable and what we want to deliver.
We have built a bunch of new product capability to enable services that we hadn’t done before. And if there was no digital India, we wouldn’t have built those solutions in areas of mobility, social services, security among others.
How are you leveraging the emerging technologies in India?
We have an IoT development group. Now the devices can do intelligent things. In order to manage these devices, to be able to get data from these devices and identify what’s going on, you need software. For example, a car company wanting to monitor what’s going on inside the car using senses. If something is wrong, then they want to send message to the person driving the car as well as the information on what’s wrong with the car and who is the nearest car dealer. This needs IoT and customer care application solutions. This is how we connect our two different portfolios to solve the problems.
Any particular vertices you are looking to tap using emerging technologies?
Transport, healthcare and manufacturing
With the leadership change in the company, how have things changed for the company?
The emphasis has changed. Now we are focusing a lot more on accelerating the growth in the cloud space. But outside that, the dynamics of the organisation and executive relationship that we have go back a long way.
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