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Technology major Oracle has chosen India as one of its key markets to take on rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google and hence, it has taken the cloud route seriously. The California-based IT giant that already accounts for 40,000 of the companys global employee strength of 130,000 in the country, is aiming at the enterprises and government for its initiatives like Digital India.

At its flagship event Oracle OpenWorld in New Delhi, held for the first time in the country, the company announced a slew of cloud-based initiatives for the Indian market. Oracle has announced it willexpand its cloud services in Indiaover the next six to nine months. This can be achieved with the opening of a new Oracle data center in India. The $37 billion company [2016] has also announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud in India to help local and multinational firms operating in India prepare for the countrys transformational tax reforms - GST.

The justification for the expansion is the explosion of growth in demand within Indian businesses and government, Dr. Andrew Sutherland, Senior Vice President, Technology and Systems, Oracle Europe, Middle East, and Africa told CXOToday.

We are in fact hoping to get a bigger slice of government spending in India on cloud, he added, stating that Gartner believes that theIndian government would spendat least US$ 7 billion on IT products in 2017, which means a lot more opportunity for players like us in the country.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz who has made a second visit to India in less than a year, also calledIndia as one of their fastest growing markets in quarterly financial results announcements in recent times.

Governments at the national and state levels are rapidly moving into the future. Digital India is the only way to empower citizens and make governments accountable - a reason why we are investing so much here, she said.

The worldwidepublic cloud servicesmarket would grow 17.2 percent to total $208.6 billion, with the highest growth come frominfrastructurecloud services. India is mirroring this trend. A recentGartnerreport indicated that Indian businesses and government are adopting cloud in greater numbers, with the public cloud computing market in the country is expected to touch a total of $1.8 billion in 2017. Of that the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment is expected to see the highest growth (49.2%).

With its next generation cloud platform, Oracle is gunning for aggressive growth in the IaaS segment.

IaaS continues to be the strongest-growing segment as it has become more mainstream and enterprises move away from data center build-outs and move their infrastructure needs to the public cloud. It allows customers to go to market faster. Being able to access a secure and scalable infrastructure will help customers to run any workload in the cloud for instant added value and productivity for their business, saidSutherland.

Asked Sutherland, since there is a strong race in the cloud computing domain, how Oracle differentiates its services from rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google, among others, he said, Oracle is now the worlds fastest growing scaled cloud company and the only company that can offer a complete portfolio across all three layers of the cloud: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS is betting big on the cloud, specifically in IaaS. What differentiates Oracles IaaS cloud from others is itsenterprise orientation and cost effectiveness.

Earlier, at a select media briefing session, Catz took a dig at cloud rivals, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), stating, Do they (AWS) provide software as a service? Do they provide Oracle database as a service? They provide raw compute as a service, yes. And this is where we compete, and at the same price, she said.

In other words, while its rivals only have cloud infrastructure, Oracle has everything, clarified the executives, as Sutherland added, Very recently, we announced the broadest array of IaaS offerings in the industry. In a nutshell, Oracles newly announced portfolio of IaaS and PaaS solutions include market leading offerings, such as:Cloud servers that are 11 times faster and 20 % cheaper (IaaS), perform 105 times faster for analytics and 35 times faster for online transaction processing, to mention a few.

With Oracle able to offer the full cloud stack of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS they can definitely in the market. DD Mishra, Research Director at Gartnercommented:As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organizations will shift toward more industrialized, less-tailored options. Organizations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimize.

In this regard, Oracle has full faith in the countrys stakeholders, asThomas Kurian, the president for product development for Oracle mentioned,Our customers and partners in India have trusted their businesses and mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud for years. Our slew of offerings further support customer choice and strengthen our commitment to the countrys market, he summed up.

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Oracle Bets On India To Grow Cloud Business - CXOToday.com