Oracle is Preparing to Launch its First Data Center in India

Buoyed by the high demand in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), telecom and manufacturing sectors in India, Cloud major Oracle is set to launch its first-ever data center in India later this year, a top global executive told IANS on Monday.

The data center, in all probability to come up in Mumbai, will help Oracle take on major Cloud players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure who already have a significant presence in the country.

"We see huge prospects for India which is currently the sixth biggest country in the world for us in terms of revenue standpoint. That is why we are building up a data center for the Cloud here. I am sure that is just the first of the many data centers coming as our business grows," Andrew Mendelsohn, Executive Vice President, Oracle Database, told IANS during an interaction.

To begin with, the data center will take care of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads, while testing for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is still going on, along with other modalities before it is opened for the market.

"We are committed to bringing our enterprise Cloud to customers globally. Continuing to support customer and partner demand, our Co-founder, Executive Chairman, and CTO Larry Ellison outlined the roadmap for Oracle's Next Gen Data centers at the "Oracle OpenWorld 2018" in San Francisco," added Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India.

"We have many customers and partners who want to run their business applications on our Gen 2 Cloud. Oracle will open additional regions in a number of countries, including India, to support our customers and fast-growing cloud business in the country," Kumar added.

Today, every bank, insurance and telecom player in India is using Oracle database, said Kumar.

Oracle, that has been a leader in the space of database technology for years, is now offering the world's first "Autonomous Database" -- a "self-driving" software that uses Machine Learning (ML) to enable unprecedented availability, high performance and security at a much lower cost.

According to Kumar, Indian customers -- both existing and new ones -- are fast embracing and upgrading to "Autonomous Database".

"These early adopters represent a mix of large enterprises, mid-size firms and born-in-the-Cloud start-ups, hailing from diverse industries -- from banking to footwear, spices to digital commerce and consulting to IT services," Kumar informed.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of retail giant Amazon, has AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Cloud region with two availability zones.

Microsoft has three of its 54 global data centers at three locations -- Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.

Google's GCP region that went live in Mumbai last year uses Google's core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning -- is offering several services, including compute, Big Data, storage and networking.