Oracle Unveils Service to Simplify Cloud Adoption in India

In a bid to cater to the needs of organisations that seek independence and security while transitioning to the cloud to reap its potential benefits, global software major Oracle on Wednesday launched a service in India to bring its public cloud in customers' data centres.

Launched ahead of Oracle CloudWorld Mumbai, the new suit of offerings is called Oracle Cloud and involves a server managed and maintained by Oracle. It runs on-premises (in the customer's data centre) and behind the firewall of the client allowing the chief information officers to easily move business critical applications to cloud.

"While organisations in India are eager to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements," Shawn Price, Oracle's senior vice president of cloud, said in a statement.

"With today's launch, Oracle addresses these challenges so that organisations across industries can reap the performance, cost and innovation benefits of Oracle Public Cloud and run it wherever they want - in Oracle Cloud or their own data centre," he added.

Customers can pick and choose the services they want such as disaster recovery, elastic bursting or any other infrastructure services, along with data management, application development, enterprise integration and management.

"Companies in India, especially those bound by regulatory pressures, can now leverage the cloud and speed up their business transformation. Oracle Cloud at Customer supports complete control over data, while facilitating data sovereignty and data residency requirements," Shailender Kumar, managing director, Oracle India, noted.

With this offering, the company hopes to bolster its cloud presence throughout India within a variety of business segments.

Additionally, customers can enable workload portability between on-premises and cloud using identical environments, toolsets and APIs (application programming interfaces). Apart from that, the customers can easily move Oracle and non-Oracle workloads between on-premises and the cloud based on their changing business requirements.

Kumar noted that many customers, including Fiat Automobiles, Hi-Tech Textile Automation, IndusInd Bank, L&T Finance, Safexpress Pvt. Ltd., Sun Edison, Schneider Electric and Toyota Kirloskar Motor Pvt Ltd have been purchasing more than one Oracle Cloud service and renewing at high rates.

Meanwhile, talking to the journalists here, Price mentioned about the company's $400-million (roughly Rs. 2,660 crores) investment in the technology hub Bengaluru.

Lauding the initiatives such as Digital India and Startup India, he said India is a potential frontrunner in cloud services in near future and this is the best time to invest in the country as it has the highest percentage of youth under the age of 30.

Price also emphasised on the significance of cloud in making Internet of Things (IoT) a success.

Although cloud-based applications are the key to using leveraged data to make IoT work, the risk of exposure to vulnerabilities during the data transfer and data storage increases on cloud.

"We have big IoT framework, tools, technologies and capabilities to extend the public cloud applications that companies own and bring the disruption of conventional architecture practices and minimise vulnerability," Price told IANS.

Price also talked about the Oracle public cloud machine - Exadata X6 - that made this new service possible.

"Keeping in mind the demand in the market, we created a hardware platform for those customers who wish to continue to work on a public cloud and reap its benefits like not paying for upgrades and reach maximum target audience," Price told IANS.

He added that this service works behind the companies firewall. With this the customer can offer cloud-like subscriptions, database and infrastructure. It fulfils the need of customers of running a "managed public cloud".

Price also confirmed that the machine is fitted with Oracle's state-of-the-art SPARC M7 microprocessor, the world's first silicon-based memory intrusion detection and a high-speed encryption chip, offers data security and memory protection without performance degradation and is cost-effective.

Oracle introduced 32-core, 256-thread SPARC M7 chip at the "OpenWorld 2015" conference in San Francisco in October last year.

Globally, Oracle Cloud has shown strong adoption, supporting 70-plus million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day. It runs in 19 data centres around the world.