“With IT budgets under rising scrutiny, using a hybrid cloud approach helps enterprises save significantly on IT CAPEX and instead use the most modern, secure, enterprise-class technologies via an OPEX, pay-per-use model. ”
Srikanth Doranadula, VP-Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India
Why is hybrid cloud emerging as the go-to IT infrastructure model for businesses?
Business and Technology have become deeply intertwined. In the rapidly changing business landscape, organizations are becoming more technology-smart to both stay ahead of the competition as well as remain relevant to customers. They are increasingly embracing hybrid cloud strategies to protect earlier investments in technology, while creating a shorter, faster runway for innovation, with the cloud. They are realizing that a hybrid cloud strategy can help them scale faster and better, given the public cloud’s innovative and flexible services. Further, organizations are also benefiting from superior economics, more choice, greater agility, improved regulatory compliance, and much stronger business resilience overall.
Why are more and more Indian organizations betting on a hybrid cloud strategy?
A hybrid cloud model offers Indian enterprises the ability to remain agile, innovate faster and introduce new products/services to their end consumers quickly, giving them the time-to-market advantage. Further, aspects like deployment choice and auto-scalability offered by a hybrid cloud model are helping Indian organizations focus more on their core business – and leave IT management to the experts i.e., cloud providers like Oracle. Advanced, automated security is another key factor, as the tech provider is responsible for regular, timely updates. For example, the flexibility of cloud deployment models we offer via our next-generation cloud infrastructure is helping Indian enterprises remain fully compliant with regulatory requirements. Another key factor is predictable and transparent pricing. With IT budgets under rising scrutiny, using a hybrid cloud approach helps enterprises save significantly on IT CAPEX and instead use the most modern, secure, enterprise-class technologies via an OPEX, pay-per-use model.
What’s Oracle’s approach to delivering hybrid cloud solutions to enterprises?
We continue to expand our footprint of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) public and Government cloud regions worldwide. Some of our other offerings that enterprises can take advantage of, to design the right hybrid cloud strategy, include:
Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure: This is our newest hybrid cloud offering within OCI. With this, we are bringing core infrastructure services to the edge with our Roving Edge Devices (REDs). These are ruggedized, portable, scalable server nodes. Using this, organizations gain the capability to run cloud workloads wherever they need them, even in the remotest locations globally.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution: Using this, a number of large and mid-size banks in India are already realizing the benefits of OCI’s dedicated, cloud-native VMware-based environment. This is helping them retain a high level of control. Auto scalability and lower costs are two other aspects resonating very well with our customers in India.
Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer: With this offering, an enterprise can avail all capabilities typically offered via a public cloud region, but they are delivered right inside their own premises. In effect, enterprises get the very same complete set of modern cloud services Oracle offers, APIs, industry-leading SLAs, greater price-performance benefits, and advanced security – but more importantly, within their own datacenters. A lot of large enterprises are finding this to be a very compelling proposition.
Oracle Exadata continues to remain one of your best-selling products within Oracle’s Hybrid Cloud Systems portfolio. Tell us about the latest innovations in the Exadata family.
Yes, Oracle Exadata platform continues to be the number one, trusted enterprise data management platform in India. Most of the country’s largest enterprises – from sectors such as BFSI and telecom, amongst others – rely on this platform to keep their business up and running smoothly. Using this platform, our customers are gaining high-performance data management capabilities directly, within their own datacenters. In addition to helping enterprises address requirements for strict data sovereignty and security by securely maintaining data on their own premises, it also offers them the advantage of operational management by virtue of an OCI-managed cloud service. One of the key highlights is, once provisioned, these databases can remain fully operational – even when they are disconnected from the cloud. Further, by choosing optional Oracle Autonomous Database capabilities, enterprises get to eliminate up to 80% of manual database operations.
We remain committed to helping customers extract the most value from their technology investments. Just a few days back, we announced the Oracle Exadata X9M next-generation. We have made this available in the public cloud, cloud@customer (inside a customer’s datacenter, behind their firewall), and on-premises. Oracle Exadata X9M offerings use a persistent-memory enhanced scalable architecture coupled with smart system software, which helps eliminate performance bottlenecks in vital customer transaction processing and analytics workloads. With this new innovation, Indian enterprises can significantly scale their online transaction speed, analytics, and performance, while cutting down costs by at least 40 percent on average.
On the one hand, Covid has accelerated the need for digitalization and cloud adoption. On the other, it seems to have widened the cloud skills gap further. How is Oracle helping customers tackle this?
In the digital economy, we understand the need for customers to get their teams up-skilled and develop a cloud-first mindset. Also, we realize it’s imperative for our partners to be enabled with the right skill set as well. As a responsible cloud major, we understand that tens of thousands of companies and many millions of users are betting their future on OCI – by deciding to run their critical business applications and workloads on OCI. Further, with OCI emerging as one of the fastest-growing cloud platforms, we are witnessing an increased demand for OCI expertise worldwide.
Given this, we are offering free OCI training, plus free certification, via Oracle University until the end of the year. Because we want to encourage many more technology professionals to progress and future-proof their careers by learning OCI for free with our expert-created training and globally recognized certification program.
