Oracle to focus on new growth verticals

Encouraged by the strong growth in business in India last fiscal, enterprise application major, Oracle is training its sights on emerging high-potential verticals such as retail, auto and textile. Briefing reporters at a media education event in
Jaipur, Oracle India MD, Krishna Dhawan said, “FY05 was the best year for us in the last five years. We saw good growth in verticals like
FSI, telecom, government and manufacturing. Now, in addition to these, we intend to focus on retail, auto and textile this year.”

The company, which recently acquired retail applications companies Retek and
ProfitLogic, plans to introduce these retail solutions in India. Like its chief competitor SAP, Oracle is also eyeing the huge opportunity in the Indian mid-market segment through its recently launched Oracle Application Server Standard Edition one. 

Elaborating on the changing applications market landscape, Krishna said that companies, that typically chose best-of-breed technologies to meet their business needs now wanted more integration between the various solutions since management and complexity of solutions was becoming an issue. He expects compliance and regulatory mandates like BASEL II and Sarbannes-Oxley Act to be the key driver for growth in FY 06. 

Oracle, which completed the PeopleSoft merger last fiscal, clocked revenues of $11.8 billion in FY05, of which, the APAC region accounted for 14% of the revenues. The company has 6,000 database customers and over 400 applications customers in India (including 125+ PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers). In FY05, the company added 70 application customers to its kitty. 

Apart from looking at the Indian market, the company continues to bet heavily on the Indian engineering talent. Oracle ERP Development VP, Murali Subramanian said that Oracle would take a decision on having a development center for Retek solutions (retail) this year. The company presently has around 6,700 employees at its development centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore and plans to increase the employee head count at both centers. 

India is slated to play an important role in the company's much-touted 'Project Fusion', which involves the development of Oracle's next generation combined application that would supercede the individual features of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Murali said that the merged application would be more standards-based and would have a better user interface. 

PRIYA PADMANABHAN 

JAIPUR