Oracle India Gets Over 100 Customers For 1st Cloud Data Centre In Mumbai

Oracle India has said that it has got more than 100 customers for its first cloud data centre it opened in the country in Mumbai on Friday. It said it will be opening another data centre in Hyderabad by the end of this financial year.

The expansion is part of the American parent company’s larger plan to open 20 new ‘Gen 2 Cloud’ data centres globally by the end of 2020. The company will also be hiring more than 1,000 people for its autonomous cloud division, Oracle India managing director Shailender Kumar told ET.

The data centre in Mumbai is seeing faster adoption among customers in manufacturing, finance, small and medium businesses and startups, he said.

While the company is looking at various areas to expand its presence in India, plans to build data centres in the country were afoot much before the data localisation norms required international companies to house data locally, according to Kumar. “It has been in the works for the last couple of years. When our CEO was here last, she announced that we’d be setting up data centres here, and parallelly we had heard about the data protection laws. We are glad that these two things came together,” he said.

Kumar also said that as an extension of its earlier announcement on the creation of an “autonomous database” division within Oracle India, more than 1,000 people would be hired in the next few quarters to the division. The fresh talent will support customers in the migration of specific business verticals to autonomous database systems provided by Oracle. The company currently employs 40,000 people in India across various divisions.

“The team is focusing on all lines of businesses (of customers) like sales, marketing, services HR, finance and they are specifically working with those people to give them autonomous database solutions.

They are helping them to build data mart and analytics over and above the (database solutions) so they can use it for strategic outcomes,” said Kumar. “Incremental hiring (within the autonomous database division) would be in sales, marketing, technical teams, consulting and we are also training our partners to implement these solutions.”

Data marts are like warehouses consisting of data but typically focused only on a single functional area or department within a company, like sales, finance or marketing.

The increase in hiring by Oracle is being seen by analysts as a competitive push by the company ahead of rivals such as Google and Microsoft who have also been setting up multiple data centres in India.―India Finance News