San Francisco: The $37-billion Oracle Corp will invest further in the R&D space in India and may even look to open a data centre in the coming years to tap the growing technology adoption by Indian companies. The Redwood City, California-based tech major, which has been pushing its cloud offerings, is optimistic that Asia's share in the company's revenue will grow on the back of the region's expanding economies, including that of China and India. Currently, Asia-Pacific contributes 17% to Oracle's global turnover. TOI caught up with Steve Au Yeung, executive VP for Asia-Pacific, Oracle Corp, during the tech major's annual event Oracle Open World to understand the company's plans for India. Excerpts:
Could you give us a sense of your R&D investments planned for India?
India, quite obviously, is a major part of our R&D investment. We are over 30,000 people in India and a majority of them are involved in the R&D function. Right now, 12% of our global revenue is spent on R&D and we would like to continue that.
How do you further use
India as a market? What
is the talent quality that is coming out of this region?
I think India on its own is a very important region. Its growth potential, the high number of the population, and also the mobile population — by all indicators, it's certainly a region we have to keep investing in. I think we have been quite lucky and fortunate to attract some very good talent from the Indian market. I am very happy with the management team we have there. And if you look at growth that we have been generating in India, it has been good progress for us.
How are your partners
adopting technology in
the Asian region specific to India?
In the past, it's always that the customer in APAC (Asia-Pacific), India included, was saying, "Okay, I don't really want XYZ. I want it to be wellproven before I even want to touch it." Now I think it's actually going the other way. Our customers in APAC now are actually much more aggressive. They say, "That's an interesting product. I want to get our hands on it. I want to see whether I can use it for my latest implementation, because I want really stateof-the-art technology. I don't really want to be a follower."
I think that is the change over the past three to five years. Another interesting one I can share is the data centre, including a few in APAC.
What kind of cuts have you seen in IT budgets and how do you approach the situation? What kind of offerings do you give to your partners and clients at a
time like this?
I don't think we will go back to the heydays when IT budgets could be increased every year. I believe that every company has to be responsible for the product line and they have to manage their IT costs very carefully today. Recently, one of our clients — a major bank in Australia — migrated from the whole mainframe environment to (Oracle's) Exadata. By doing so, they significantly reduced the number of storage machines they need to use. They also saved a lot of cost on space and power. Now all that can be put as savings, which goes back into investment. So, I think that's the way it will be going forward. You have to look at how you innovate, trim down some of the costs and shift it to a thing where you can do some new business.
(The correspondent was in San Francisco on an invitation from Oracle Corp) Steve Au Yeung EXECUTIVE VP (APAC), ORACLE CORP |
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