Exclusive Interview: Srikanth Doranadula, VP- Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Srikanth Doranadula, Vice President - Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India shared insights on Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, the latest generation of the Oracle Database platform in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Please share details about cloud adoption in India and its various benefits.

Cloud acceptance in India has been witnessing an uptick for many years now however the pandemic was a major propeller in this movement making digital transformation as significant as it is today. During the last few years, globally as well as within our country, companies have realised the value of a robust cloud infrastructure to support business continuity and achieve their overall goals. Gartner predicts that end-user spending on public cloud services in India is forecasted to total $7.3 billion in 2022. With such a significant number, the underlying interest of many late adopters of technology is also visible in addition to the already cloud smart organisations.

IDC has also predicted that 40% of Indian organizations will implement dedicated cloud services either on-premise or in a service provider facility by 2024. This is a testimony of what the future potentially holds for the cloud in the country.

Other cloud avenues like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are also expected to grow as early adopters of cloud realise the value that these bring. The Global Hybrid Cloud Market is expected to grow by registering a CAGR of 21.06% over the forecast period (2021-2026). This testifies to the fact that a hybrid cloud is going to be one of the most critical aspects of any organisation’s cloud journey.

Cloud has truly helped many businesses to keep up with their existing growth plans and focus on their key offerings. It has helped eliminate the need to add any non-core capability and has allowed the key resources to dedicate themselves to achieving organisational goals and addressing customer demand. Cloud-first organisations also have a significant edge over others where they can leverage technologies like data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, IoT or even blockchain to streamline their business for better results.

What are the new announcements regarding? Please share thoughts behind it, its benefits globally, and key differences when compared to other providers?

We have announced the availability of Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M. Through this, we are bringing the latest generation of the Oracle Database platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with an aim to provide our customers with the ability to run existing workloads faster and more efficiently. Oracle’s Exadata platform in its essence is truly made to be flexible. It offers Oracle’s best-in-class experience both on-premise and in the cloud. The customers get a vertical integration that combines Oracle’s software, hardware and cloud innovation ultimately leading to exponential value.

Being a customer-centric organisation, we constantly aim to understand their requirements and we found that globally they are constantly on a quest to scale and fulfil demand. Therefore, with Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, businesses will witness better scalability to achieve their goal. Oracle also is a keen believer in cloud economics thus the latest generation is available at lower costs than the previous generation making it an ideal pick for the customers.

When compared to other providers, Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M sub-19 microsecond IO latency is 25 times better than the half-millisecond latency offered by other players. Also with 64 storage servers, X9M delivers up to 2880 GB/s of aggregate analytics scan throughput.

Exadata Cloud Infrastructure also supports scaling up consumption on database servers and scaling out the number of database servers used without any downtime.

How Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is better than X8M?

Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is a significant update from X8M allowing database OLTP workloads in the cloud to be accelerated with 2.5 times more database cores and 87% more OLTP IOPS than the previous generation. It also allows customers to run database analytics faster and with larger data sets. With the new generation, customers are offered up to 8,064 database server vCPUs, 2.5 times more than X8M and up to 3.1 PB of uncompressed database capacity, a 28 percent increase.

What are the benefits of Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M to Indian customers?

India is rapidly growing with innumerable business opportunities. As enterprises realise the importance of the cloud and embark on their cloud transformation journey, we are excited to be their partners. With Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, the customers will realise better scalability which is the need of the hour for many Indian enterprises. They will also be able to run their workloads faster and more efficiently allowing them to make quicker decisions.

With the new generation of Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure, customers also have deployment flexibility basis their preference including on-premise, cloud@customer for hybrid cloud and Exadata cloud as a service for public cloud.

What are the different partner strategies for this new announcement?

Partners have been our backbone for reaching out to customers in the marketplace, we collaborate closely with them to help take the solution messaging across to the customers across different market segments. This can be across Large GSI, Midmarket partners, and ISVs. We are also working closely with ISVs to have their software solutions for these new technologies so that we can take them jointly into the market space. We also have a specific initiative for Service providers to leverage and jointly do a GTM on the Exa Solutions via our MSP program

Please share Oracle’s strategy for growth in the Indian market.

Oracle is extremely dedicated to its Indian market and has witnessed an equal amount of reciprocation and acceptance from Indian customers. This is a reason behind us ensuring double digit growth consecutively for the last 4-5 years. Our primary way of operating in the Indian market is to constantly learn and understand how the customers’ demand is evolving to provide the best products and services to them. With this understanding, we have been able to run two-second generation cloud regions in India - one in Mumbai and in Hyderabad. Both our cloud regions in India are MeitY empanelled because we understand the need for public sector organisations to dive into their cloud journey. We have also continued our commitment in India by expanding our West Cloud Region capacity with Nxtra by Airtel last year.

OCI with its high performance and low costs has been consistently witnessing an uptick in adoption by Indian customers. We also don’t give any cost surprises which keeps our customers aware of the entire structure in advance. In an endeavour to provide better offers to our customer we have another initiative which is Oracle support rewards. This is specifically to help organisation lower their software support costs and help them with their cloud journey.