Oracle India’s cloud business grows 58% in first quarter, adds 10 new public sector clients

In India, customers still continue to migrate from on-prem to cloud, whether it is banking financial services or healthcare industry. Oracle is especially seeing demand from banking, fintechs and financial services players, she said.

Last week, Oracle chief executive officer (CEO) Safra Catz shared that cloud services have become the company’s largest business, both in terms of operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated.

Catz also said Oracle Cloud, long-term rivals like AWS, Google and Microsoft are now partners and the technology is heading for a multi-cloud approach, which will lead to customers getting interoperable services and features across the globe and at shared costs.

In India, too, AI has been a key growth driver for Oracle’s success.

“Whether it is AI, large language models -- every customer wants to see how they can leverage these new and emerging technologies, so that they have the competitive edge to drive their growth and performance in a better way,” Premalakshmi said. “That's where we are getting into both in terms of our overall multi-cloud strategy, and the AI momentum that we are seeing in the market. In India, AI is definitely a big opportunity that customers want to leverage. We are seeing a lot of traction and we have also won large deals with many of our customers within India itself.”

Oracle is capturing new markets, going into smaller cities and is accelerating its modernisation journey, she added.

Speaking about the cloud applications business in India, Shailesh Singla, vice president, Cloud Applications, Oracle India, said customer experience (CX) business grew 38 percent YoY in Q1, and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) business 12 percent.

This was majorly driven by the growth in the BFSI space with newer NBFC customers signing up. “We had five times the win of what we did in the last five years. This was a marquee vertical for us and we had a series of win and we were almost adding one customer every three - four weeks…We released some 100 Gen AI use cases, and it cuts across the spectrum of products,” Singla said.

Oracle is also seeing increased traction from the IT/ITes sector and the healthcare space. In healthcare, it has top players such as Fortis and Apollo as customers. Within BFSI, Max Life Insurance and Muthoot Fin Corp are some of the customers seeing significant efficiency gains by using OCI services.

Also read: Long-term rivals are now our partners: Oracle leadership on offering multi-cloud solutions

Oracle NetSuite expansion

Oracle is also expanding its ERP software offering NetSuite in India, seeing opportunity in the mid-market segments.

It is adding two new data centres in India by 2025, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) existing regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad, Evan Goldberg, the founder and executive vice president of NetSuite, said.

“There have been certain companies from a local compliance perspective, they wanted data to be residing in the country. So this is going to help us address some of those markets which we have not been able to earlier addressed,” Amit Suxena, vice president, NetSuite JAPAC, said.

“We have also gone in with a very aggressive geo-expansion,” he said. So far, Oracle was operating primarily out of Bengaluru but now it was going to all the cities in India. “We have gone north right up to Chandigarh. We are going into Jammu & Kashmir. We are going east into Kolkata. We have now got teams based out of Kolkata… And we are expanding via our partner network in India primarily. So we have got lots of partners in each of these places. So big opportunity,” Suxena said.

NetSuite in India is seeing a massive growth in the mid-market segment. These would include companies which have not been on any kind of ERP systems so far. Many of them are family businesses, which are newly adopting technology.

(The correspondent was in Las Vegas on Oracle's invitation.)