Oracle plans data centre in India

BENGALURU: Thomas Kurian was appointed the president of Oracle responsible for product development in January, making him the senior-most executive in the company after co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd. Kurian, who reports to executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison, is seen as a strong contender for the corner office.

Kurian talks about the company opening its tenth product development centre in India in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) and how the country has emerged as the second-largest product development workforce outside the US. Close on the heels of rival Microsoft setting up data centres in India, Oracle is also firming up similar plans with its partners. In an exclusive interview, Kurian, who grew up in Bengaluru, talks about India's role in Oracle's overall product story.Excerpts:

How has India shaped Oracle's product strategy?

We have a global products strategy and we define the markets we want to enter. We're currently focused on five primary segments — cloud, engineered systems, information management (database system), applications infrastructure (middleware business) and packaged apps. When we look at entering new markets, we start concurrently in India. Every product has a team in India, largely driven by the fact that we have amazing technical talent here.

Oracle hired 2,300 engineers in product development in 2015 fiscal of which 18% were college graduates. When we entered the market in 1994, Oracle wanted to make India a large place for product development. We didn't contract with any firm. Success in India meant three things to product development — being able to attract the best people and India is not just about maintenance of existing products, but building new products. We wanted India to be self-sufficient in terms of managing the entire lifecycle development.

Oracle competes with Amazon, Salesforce and Workday. How have you done better than the competition?

Last year, we sold substantially more cloud business than Salesforce globally and more than ten times the size of Workday in terms of customers. We have a product portfolio and go-to-market with our sales teams both catching up and in many cases surpassing Workday and Salesforce. On a full year basis, we added more new revenue to Oracle and more new customers than Salesforce by a large amount.

Oracle is increasingly focusing on the cloud, while revenue from new software licenses has seen a decline. How does this impact your business?

Our gross margins are doing well. We're investing in capital infrastructure like data centres ahead of demand. We're confident that the long-term profitability of our cloud business would be at least as valuable, if not better than our existing on-premise business.

You've seen the first wave of IT services in India. Do you think Bengaluru is morphing into a product hub?

Any industry starts with services. Bengaluru started with offshoring, then moved to higher services as skills in the technology and engineering community evolved. Now, we see many of these companies deliver products, largely because there is more value in products because of the intellectual property.

You've worked closely with Ellison. Are you in the race for the top job?

We've worked together for 17 years. Larry is a smart technologist and has a great vision of where tech is going. I work closely with him, taking ideas he has and shaping them into products. We have a very collaborative relationship. As for the top job, I don't want to comment on it or think about it.