Oracle upbeat on India
The company spent the past year making the last-mile connectivity with India's business segment, reports Prerna K Mishra.
The string of acquisitions made by Oracle in the past two years is tying up well with the Indian economic growth story, especially with opportunities in the high-growth segments of finance, telecom, utility and retail.
The company has spent the past year making the last-mile connectivity with the burgeoning small and medium business segment in 17 of India’s high-growth cities.
This year it will consolidate its presence by setting up a new campus in Bangalore to give it a larger bandwidth for future growth, Oracle India Managing Director Krishan Dhawan told
Hindustan Times
.
Oracle has aggressively ramped up operations in India from about 6,700 employees a few years ago to over 18,000, with India accounting for the company’s largest research and development investment outside of the US.
“It is interesting how our acquisition of Peoplesoft, Seibel, Retek, i-flex and a couple of smaller companies in the telecom and utility space have found a suitable fit in the opportunities that the growing businesses in India are investing in,” says Dhawan.
India has become the fourth largest market for Oracle in Asia in terms of revenues up from tenth a few years ago.
The company is expanding in tier II and III cities to take the growth to the next level. The expansion into cities such as Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kochi, Coimbatore, Goa, Raipur, Surat, Bhubaneswar, is in keeping with the fact that nearly 54 per cent of information technology spend in India comes from SME segment, according to research firm IDC.
By conservative estimates (Nasscom), the SMB sector is Rs 770-crore market for companies like Oracle, with Indian SMEs becoming a part of the global supply chain.
So far, the Indian software industry was export-oriented, unlike China where it was used to fuel domestic productivity. But the good news is that the Indian market is coming around to that, adds Dhawan.
The company that shares the pinch of skilled manpower scarcity with the rest of the industry has tied up with the Karnataka authorities to drive the curriculum and courseware of the 100 odd polytechnics in the state.
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