Oracle recently added a range of services to its existing cloud offerings. Do you feel the absence of a data center in India could prove to be a bottleneck in marketing them?
We recently launched 24 new additions that complement our Saas, PaaS and IaaS offerings. There is a huge appetite for our SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings even without a data center here. No doubt, there are a few regulated markets that require data centers in India but there are customers who are worried more about getting the right business applications and platforms up and running as opposed to where the data center lies. We have just touched the tip of iceberg in terms of our cloud penetration in India. With these new offerings we have a huge market to address. A data center is in our plans but there is a large market even before that, which we can go and address.
But Oracle’s cloud revenues are only about $2.3 Billion. Microsoft and Amazon, meanwhile, earn $3.6 Billion each from their cloud portfolios. How do you intend to close the gap?
We are not going to catch up. It will be a big leap that we will take. There are three large categorizations in the cloud market – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The players you mentioned operate in a small portion of the cloud market. The two players are present largely in the IaaS space, which is a low commodity, low value market.
SaaS is the business applications market while PaaS is database, IoT, analytics, and middleware market. We provide the complete stack of Iaas, PaaS and SaaS. In the past, we could not address lots of integration challenges that customer had. We couldn’t address their mobility and analytics challenges. Today, with the launch of 24 new services, those markets are open to us. We are already the number two SaaS player globally and will be soon become number one. We will clearly become the number one enterprise cloud player in the world. The new services will complete that story.
So what is the big differentiator that would attract a CIO to Oracle’s cloud?
While we will certainly partner a CIO, we will provide value to all Lines of Business -- CFO, CHRO, CMO as well as the IT user. Today, if a business consumed cloud from any service provider and wanted to move back to on-premise, there was no way to do it. The business had to lose all the innovation that it had done on the cloud or on-premise, and start all over again. Oracle is the only cloud provider that enables this move at the click of a button. The investments made by an enterprise are protected. This is the biggest differentiator for us.
But security is still an issue that stops many CIOs from going to the cloud. How secure are your cloud services?
Security is at the core of everything that we do. Every one of our 19 data centers is a level 4 facility. There is a biometric and physical security in each one of them. Our infrastructure itself has highest levels of security. We addressed the Heartbleed bug at the hardware level as a result today our chips have encryption technology and can’t be hacked at any level. Oracle can’t, by design, access customer data. Customers use our advanced security options like database vault and encryption.
On the business application front, we have implemented role-based access control across the stack. We are running 600 petabytes of storage, we do 70 million plus transactions every day and serve 2.5 to 3 billion customer daily, and there has not been a single breach at any of our data centers yet.
As the CTO, you have to come up with products that are profitable. How is cloud more profitable than traditional?
Firstly, we are not in the cloud space because we want to make profits. We are in it because the customers want it. Customers have been asking us when will we start giving us the very same on-premise solutions of big data, analytics, database, middleware, mobility on the cloud. At the need of the day we have to disrupt the way we sell and service customers. Cloud is the third wave of IT. Every single new e-commerce player and start-up comes to us because they understand they can have robust technology available to them. We have to understand that customers need this to innovate. Oracle will partner them in their innovative journey because only if they are profitable, will we be also profitable.
