Oracle India aims high at enterprise apps space

The past few years have seen a lot of volatility in the database management industry, with each player trying to bring in some extra edge in its offering to the customer. However, one player that has held the position of being a clear leader in the database segment is Oracle. According to market experts, what has helped the second largest software firm in the world stand out is its product leadership and functionality differentiality. Oracle recently won the Skoch Challenger Award 2003 in the enterprise applications segment. Experts point out that going by its current growth, Oracle India has the potential to double its current marketshare of 9 percent, valued at Rs 22.48 crore.

Completeness, consolidation and standardisation have become the buzzwords in the RDBMS space today and Oracle has already made its mark in integrated enterprise application solutions. Having realised this early on, the company smoothly transformed itself from being a DBM solutions provider to a complete IT architecture provider. This has also been possible due to its recent attempt to leverage its database strengths to other enterprise application segments. The total cost of ownership (TCO) factor has helped the company gain a significant edge over its competitors.

Says S P S Grover, Oracle India’s director for e-business, “The Oracle e-business suite is the first and only set of applications to work with a single global database as it allows one to connect and automate the entire flow of business processes across the front and back office. The e-business integration obviates the need for a majority of software integration projects, which make up 50 percent of all IT consulting work.” The company has successfully implemented the e-business suite in companies like TCS and Escorts to Forbes Marshal and EXL services.

Last year, unlike other industry segments, the RDBMS sector witnessed steady growth, which helped Oracle to continue with its market initiatives. The company could get a steady inflow of revenues from the corporate segment, with many companies moving up the value chain (many low-end players moved to high-end). India also topped the list for call centre software sales in the APAC region.

In the coming months, Oracle is expecting an increase in its customer base for the Oracle e-business suite—with many companies having had a tough time managing their enterprise applications. The company expects the database management industry to grow at a rate of 25-30 percent. “Customers have a lot of options, right from choosing individual e-business suites (which can be scaled up) to integrating other applications from competitors (like SAP and PeopleSoft) to the option of an online service,” Grover says. SMEs are expected to be another growth driver for the company in the coming months.

On the technology front, Oracle is optimistic about its Oracle 9i database, which it claims is the first database software to run any packaged application with unlimited scalability and total reliability across multiple computers, and has already gone through 15 security certifications. Besides, the company is also planning to greatly benefit from the growth and spread of Linux and is aggressively supporting the open source platform. (Oracle’s DBM solutions support the Linux OS.)

In the collaborative application arena, Oracle has recently launched a new Oracle Collaboration suite. The new Oracle Collaboration suite is more secure, reliable, and virus-free, claims the company. Oracle’s product will let users store documents, e-mail, voice mail, and data files in Oracle 9i, and search for them by date and key word. This new collaboration suite from Oracle also aims at leveraging its database expertise to lower the cost and increase the security of enterprise messaging.

In future, e-governance is going to be a key focus segment for Oracle. The other segments that the company would be aggressively targeting are verticals like healthcare, education, e-governance, infrastructure development, security, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and the manufacturing segment. In addition to this, the company would also be ramping up its workforce from close to 2,400 to 6,000 professionals and expanding the Hyderabad operations by setting up another facility (8,000 square feet), which is expected to come up in the next 18-24 months time.

— Punita Jasrotia