California-headquartered Oracle, which provides database management solutions and corporate software, clocked revenues of $10.8 billion in its last quarter, a first for the company in its 33-year history. Sandeep Mathur, managing director of Oracle India tells HT about the company’s growth saga and its initiatives on the cloud computing. Excerpts:
Oracle’s growth has been phenomenal over the last couple of quarters. Is it because of the numerous acquisitions made by the company?
Acquisitions do play a part but to say the feat was achieved only because of us buying out companies and that their revenues added up to Oracle’s top line is over-simplification. In fact, during the last couple of years we have made progress on developing the engineered systems that is best when both hardware and software work together. It is not just compatibility of hardware and software rather both of them designed to work together. So we are being able to provide the choice to the customers so that they can buy our Oracle database and run it on multiple environments if they want to, but if they want very high performance at low costs, then they now have an option from Oracle where they can get that together.
But how does it help a customer?
Apart from the advantages that include a high performance, savings on power, disk storage, this gives a standard configuration to a customer (company). To elaborate, let’s assume if a company integrates system servers, storage bought from different vendors it would get a very unique system. So what happens if a little bit of this system needs to be upgraded, then it becomes a major hassle since you have a completely unique system and nobody can be sure if the upgrade can work on it because nobody has tested it. On the contrary, in our engineered system everybody owns the same system whatever the versions be and that helps in quick hassle free upgrades.
But how does it help a customer?
Apart from the advantages that include a high performance, savings on power, disk storage, this gives a standard configuration to a customer (company). To elaborate, let’s assume if a company integrates system servers, storage bought from different vendors it would get a very unique system. So what happens if a little bit of this system needs to be upgraded, then it becomes a major hassle since you have a completely unique system and nobody can be sure if the upgrade can work on it because nobody has tested it. On the contrary, in our engineered system everybody owns the same system whatever the versions be and that helps in quick hassle free upgrades.
What are the cloud initiatives?
Oracle is in the business of helping companies create their own cloud infrastructure, we have everything from storage, servers, operating systems, database, middleware. So if a company wants to build its private cloud or public cloud, we can give them that as an environment.
Which are the other sectors where you see growth opportunity?
We have a dominant position in telecom, banking and government. Also we have a lot to offer to enterprise and mid-sized companies across other sectors.