Exclusive Interview: Kapil Makhija, Head-Technology Cloud, Oracle India

Indian Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are advancing the country’s digitalization agenda, helping more and more traditional businesses, especially non-metros, get onto the digital highway. As more Indian organizations look to accelerate their digital journey and strengthen digital resilience, they will turn to cloud-based ISVs to simplify their business and focus on sustaining/fast-tracking growth.

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Kapil Makhija, Head-Technology Cloud, Oracle India shared deep insights on how Indian niche ISVs are turning to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to change growth orbits.

How are Indian ISVs helping accelerate India’s digitalization agenda?

The pandemic has further widened the gap between digital-savvy organizations and the traditional ones. The former were certainly better equipped to cope with the challenges brought about by the pandemic, vis-à-vis the latter. To strengthen business resilience, we see most Indian organizations opting for a technology-first approach to business. They are keen to fast-track their digital journey to accelerate growth recovery, boost innovation and enhance customer experience. In the process, they are also able to lower costs. And to help them get their digital journey right, these organizations are turning to Indian ISVs.

On their part, ISVs are helping enterprises develop a digital-first mindset and design the right cloud strategy. They are delivering easy-to-use SaaS solutions as a pay-as-you-go cloud service to enterprises, using which, enterprises are able to modernize as well as focus better on their core business instead of having to invest time, resources and efforts to ‘manage IT’.

Why is cloud economics an important factor for ISVs when choosing a cloud provider?

Today, ISVs operating in India are assisting customers across the world in their digital transformation journeys. As their organizations grow in size and geographic scope, they must innovate at a faster rate while de-focusing from the mundane responsibilities of routine (but necessary) IT management. This freedom is provided by the cloud, allowing them to focus on their main business objectives. In their selection of cloud infrastructure, ISVs prioritize business value, security, and resiliency. So ISVs are choosing to collaborate with next-generation cloud infrastructure providers like Oracle to help develop a faster runway for innovation and achieve business excellence.

Let me give you an example. For an ISV catering to the OTT/streaming space or perhaps for an ISV focused on EdTech/online learning, they will have large volumes of outbound data to manage. The costs of using a traditional cloud provider can be unreasonable over a period of time. So choosing the right cloud provider, with predictable, transparent and uniform global pricing is the key to realizing superior cloud economics.

What’s the overall market opportunity for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in this space?

ISVs are a high-growth, high-volume segment for OCI. So ISVs will contribute significantly to our cloud growth over the next few years. More importantly, ISVs will help our enterprise customers achieve more with less.

From a business momentum perspective, we have consistently clocked high double-digit growth in India over the last 4-5 years. We have also doubled our overall customer base: from 7500 to 15000 - in the same timeframe. Both our MeitY empanelled next-generation cloud regions in the country (Mumbai and Hyderabad) are almost running at peak capacity. So we recently announced an expansion of our Mumbai cloud region with Airtel Nxtra.

We will continue to focus on helping BFSI, Manufacturing, MSMEs, ISVs/SIs, and neo-digital firms - and of course the public sector firms - in modernizing their businesses, accelerating innovation, and improving their service delivery capabilities. We are also focused on new growth areas where cloud usage is on the rise: such as online education, streaming service providers/OTT tech providers, and others that deal with enormous amounts of data.

Why are more Indian niche ISVs bidding goodbye to their first-generation cloud providers and turning to OCI to change growth orbits?

Be it technology, pricing or ease of migration, ISVs are fast realizing wide-ranging benefits by using OCI.

Our next-generation cloud infrastructure provides a comprehensive set of public cloud services that enable ISVs to build and run a wide range of modern applications in a scalable, secure, highly available, and high-performance environment with enterprise-class SLAs. OCI, the only cloud platform that provides autonomous services, is designed for organizations seeking higher performance at reduced prices.

OCI delivers higher performance and lower costs for virtually every enterprise software application and is consistently less expensive than other cloud providers for a wide range of popular cloud workloads. Oracle has simple rate structures that eliminate the cost surprises associated with hard-to-estimate usage elements such as data egress or storage performance.

Let me explain one important aspect of our pricing strategy: we provide the industry's lowest cost for outbound data transfer (popularly referred to as egress). This is a critical aspect for ISVs as they aim to support their enterprise customers with high volumes of outbound data in migrating to OCI and gaining greater price-performance benefits. This is a major reason why global organizations like Zoom and 8x8 chose to migrate to OCI.

Another key aspect is migration. OCI offers the opportunity to ISV to migrate or build applications with minimal re-architecture or re-integration and delivers higher performance at a lower cost than deployments running on-premises or on other clouds. OCI includes all the core infrastructure and platform-as-a-service options to meet key application needs. And with Oracle Cloud Lift Services, ISVs can obtain free expert guidance from cloud engineers on planning, architecting, prototyping, and managing cloud migrations.

Last but not the least, Oracle Support Rewards is one of our new initiatives designed to help organizations accelerate their cloud adoption while also lowering their software support costs. Customers who use Oracle technology licensing support can earn at least 25 cents in Support Rewards for every dollar spent on OCI Universal Credits, and in some cases, completely eliminate license support costs by using OCI.

Can you share some examples of ISVs moving to OCI for high performance and growth?

Impartus Innovation is a good example in India. Impartus has collaborated with well-known universities to deliver virtual classes to over 500,000 Indian students. Impartus anticipates greater application performance as well as a 40% cost savings by operating their virtual classrooms on OCI.

Another noteworthy example is Skandha Media Services, a premium cloud video platform supplier for DigitalTV and PayTV Operators. With OCI, the organization saw a 40% improvement in application performance and operational efficiencies in 30% less time.x