India is accelerating its innovation curve with cloud: Rajan Krishnan, Group V-P, Oracle Product Development

RAJAN KRISHNAN, Group Vice President, Oracle Product Development

Rajan Krishnan is a group vice president in Oracle product development. He is responsible for outbound product management for Oracle Cloud applications across enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, human capital management, and customer relationship management. In a recent conversation with Sudhir Chowdhary, he talks about Oracle clocking strong growth and how it is pushing the pedal to accelerate innovation, growth and digitalisation for its customers through cloud. Excerpts:

What are the major trends within SaaS and back-office enterprise software like ERP?
Before the pandemic, customers were grappling with their legacy systems and their IT budgets were kept only to continue operations as opposed to really innovating. On the back-office front, customers were already looking at the notion of going digital and to the cloud but pandemic has accelerated their adoption and everything from systems to digitalisation is driven by cloud. Remote working, from financial operations to closing books to producing statements and controling the suppliers, is done on cloud and this is a big shift that’s happening from the SaaS and finance standpoint. We had a record number of go-lives for Cloud ERP during the pandemic and today we have 8500+ customers for Cloud ERP alone.

Similar kind of growth has been witnessed on the HCM side where working from anywhere allows clients to manage their workforce remotely.

Specific to India and Asia Pacific (Apac) region, what sort of growth have you witnessed ever since the pandemic has hit?
We announced our year-end results for FY21 in June and we have seen 46% growth in the back office segment, that is, Fusion ERP; 35% in Fusion HCM and another 26% growth in MSME with the NetSuite, globally. The Fusion ERP segment growth at 46% was already on top of over 30% growth in the previous quarter and these numbers remain consistent in APAC region and in India. Our CEO Safra Catz said she expects the growth to continue powered many times by transformation journeys and also other external factors. For us, Apac is an important market and within that, the focus has been on India.

Do you see a shift in tech requirements, more specifically cloud uptake, in APAC and India?
In terms of technology uptake, there is a slant towards cloud and the shift is driven by the need to better control the cost, predictability, and faster consumption of innovation that wasn’t possible earlier. Buying a complete stack from Oracle makes a lot of difference as it is a huge differentiator on top of industry-specific offerings. Industry-specific applications plus horizontal applications like back office – ERP, supply chain, CX, and HCM are built on a robust technology stack and having a strong foundation of cloud allows customers to take advantage of other innovations like AI, ML, IoT, Blockchain, ubiquitous analytics, modern user experiences, and modern mobile experiences.

What is Oracle’s go-to-market strategy and roadmap for the Asia Pacific region?
There are three segments to our strategy. First, completeness of the portfolio and the kind of movement we offer. All our solutions are driven by a common data model that provides flexibility to select solutions they want to start with and then expand over time, according to their needs and preference. This is our differentiating factor as we are the only tech player that allows for these journeys giving consistency of architecture, user experience and analytics.

Second, completeness from an industry-specific standpoint where we talk about capabilities for life sciences. There are some safety features or attributes of vaccines in pregnant women which was picked up by our data insights through Oracle clinical. Third, in the India and APAC market, there is a pronounced shift towards industry-specific go-to-market strategies. For instance, telecom billing moves to telecom provisioning to telecom supply chain and ultimately to telcom financial management. Similar cases are visible in banking and some aspects of the public sector.

Any latest customer wins and customer success stories seen in India?
We have a diverse range of customers across industries. Apollo Tyres is an example from consumption standpoint and it has recently gone live with our IoT applications called Fleet Management. The solution allows in managing fleet including the health and conditions of trucks. Also, you get data insights like oil or tyre levels and driver safety. Aurobindo Pharma has standardised IoT components with Oracle Transportation management. Sandhar Technologies have seen success within the supply chain and ERP segment in the India market. Healthcare, professional services, banking, e-commerce, and manufacturing are core areas where we are continuing to see more wins.