What is the landscape of SaaS market in India and how it is growing?
A SaaS dominated technology market has never been more real. With customer expectations continuing to outpace experiences, the SaaS market is being shaped by a few top players who can support the digital transformation of enterprises with customer centricity at the helm. According to a recent NASSCOM report, the Indian SaaS market is estimated to hit $3.3–3.4 billion by 2022.
India has been at the helm of this progress with our SaaS business having grown by about 31-32 per cent year-on-year. Our core SaaS solution, Oracle Fusion ERP has witnessed more than 50 per cent YoY growth in the 1H. We are growing 3-4x times the market in SaaS apps, which is a clear indicator that we are taking share from competitors. We are outpacing the market and we want to be the #1 SaaS provider in India. The Indian cloud business is really booming. We are supporting some of the largest transformational deals in India – Taj hotels, Hindalco, Indian Oil, SBI, Adani, Reliance, AU Finance, Transworld, SBI, Bajaj Electricals. We are seeing most traction for Oracle SaaS from companies representing the government, manufacturing, financial services and education sectors.
What we’re seeing is a lot of interest in the cloud shown by both customers and prospects in India. Customers are starting their cloud journeys now. Since we have multiple deployment models to offer in the public cloud, customers can take full advantage of it. We cater to almost any type of data sovereignty issues that might arise, so we are very bullish on the Indian market.
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“Oracle continues to add ground-breaking innovations to its comprehensive suite of applications developed for businesses of all sizes and industries.”
Pradeep Agarwal,
Senior Director, ERP Cloud,
Oracle India
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Which are the vertical markets embracing SaaS aggressively?
In India and globally, the number of companies choosing Oracle SaaS solutions over the competition is increasing. These customers are a mix of large firms, mid-size SMBs and Cloud natives. We have customers from sectors like manufacturing, retail, hospitality, social welfare, engineering and construction, logistics, oil and gas, among others. We have helped large and older firms like Indian Oil, Hindalco, Indian Hotels, SBI Card, Genpact and Sandhar Automotive in their digital transformation. At the same time, we have Cloud-native disruptors like Oyo Rooms, Rivigo Systems and KLAY Prep Schools in our customers’ list. Oracle has understanding and dexterity to support customers of any size, with every thinkable requirement from any sector.
What are Oracle’s SaaS offerings in India?
Oracle continues to add ground-breaking innovations to its comprehensive suite of applications developed for businesses of all sizes and industries. Recent product innovations include machine learning updates to Oracle ERP Cloud to enable organizations of all sizes to quickly and easily take advantage of innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants, natural language processing, and the Internet of Things. Oracle HCM Cloud enables HR professionals to make work more human by improving the entire workplace experience for employees, candidates and HR professionals. Oracle provides organizations a complete HCM cloud solution that drives digital transformation and improves business agility while meeting both current and future business requirements. Oracle CX is an integrated set of applications across marketing, sales, service and commerce. The latest updates to Oracle CX include enhancements to Oracle CX Unity, Oracle’s enterprise-class customer data management platform.
How do you see the competitive landscape in this space?
Investment in Software-as-a-Service brings in a strong advantage for firms to bring in great opportunities. It deepens the understanding of how IT can enable agility by sensing innovation and capturing market opportunities for competitive action. The ability to produce the desired results in a turbulent environment and aligning the processes sum up to justify the competitive landscape.
Our biggest differentiator is that we are the only one in the cloud market that can provide pre-integrated solutions. Today, we are the only complete ‘Cloud Suite vendor’ in the market offering a judicious blend of cloud applications, pre-embedded with the latest technologies and upgrades. This gives Oracle customers an unprecedented advantage of saving hugely on integration in-turn driving business optimization through connected intelligence.
What is the economic ramification behind SaaS?
The SaaS model was designed to deliver a core set of business benefits. The implementation of SaaS solutions lowers the overall front cost as it eliminates the need for additional hardware and middleware. It also reduces installation and implementation costs. Since, all the variables are controlled by the service provider, SaaS implementation abolishes the unpredictable costs of managing, patching, and updating software and hardware and thus turning capital expenses into operational expenses. There is another business benefit is the almost negligible down time as these solutions can be deployed and run in matters of hours instead of months. Every growing business needs scalable applications to handle the inevitable increases in data and transactions and SaaS can provide this scalability.
What is Oracle’s broad SaaS go to market programme and its evolution over the years?
Oracle is actively building advanced technology into the Oracle Cloud. We are including Artificial intelligence applications, Chatbots or conversational interfaces, Advanced predictive analytics and Machine learning (ML) in our ERP cloud. We are updating our offerings to help our customers achieve targets faster and in a smarter way. We support our existing on-prem customers through their transition journey to Oracle cloud and we have a game-changer offering called – The Soar Program. Oracle Soar to the cloud is the world’s first automated cloud migration offering that enables Oracle customers to save time, cut costs and stay focused on business. The data in the on-premises application is automatically extracted, transformed, and loaded into the cloud application.
Soar 2.0 comes with an approach that is being termed as an industry first- an experience of using cloud before buying cloud. A future-ready showcase of how a customer’s future would look and feel like on cloud, exactly the way it would span out when they implement. Our program supports our customers with experience before buying to help them embrace change, promote innovation and challenge the status-quo in upgrading to the cloud.
The program ensures that this is the last upgrade you will ever do because all your future upgrades will be managed by Oracle.
What is your plan for 2020 from market access point of view?
Our vision/ ambition is to dominate the India SaaS market and with that goal, we went live with SaaS on our Gen 2 Data center in India. Our clear target is to be the #1 cloud applications company globally and in India now equipped with a SaaS Datacenter, we are a step closer to acquiring that position. We have innovation and a strategy; our competitors can’t match.
