The Hindu Business Line : Strong hand of support

ORACLE India's global support services (GSS) centre in Hyderabad, besides providing support, is taking to innovative services. It is in the process of launching what is being referred to as Auto Diagnostics.

Rajeev Shroff, Senior Director, India Support Centre, Oracle India, in a chat with eWorld.

How does the support services centre function? Could you explain its mandate and how it has grown over the years?

One of the most important responsibilities entrusted with the centre has been the handling of critical global support work of the highest severity, out of India.

The Indian centre has been able to pick out engineers from each team and quickly form a core group handling high severity issues. The team is delivering results, demonstrating agility and energy.

The centre is not just about reactive problem-solving but focusing proactively on problem avoidance.

It follows the concept of knowledge management — having an intensive knowledge repository consisting of knowledge articles for common issues and their resolution; as well as documents and white papers detailing the functional and technical aspects of a product.

As a policy, we do not give division-wise break-up of revenues. However, over the past five years, the centre has grown to full maturity.

This is due to its geographical location, its resource pool and the demonstrated ability of quick support readiness, flexibility and skills across the product-spectrum.

It has become one of the major pillars of Oracle's global support services delivery model.

How do you leverage cross-functional expertise from a global perspective?

The Oracle Information Architecture enables information in one repository, for efficient IT operations.

The centre has leveraged this to provide integrated offerings. Be it services, consulting, product support, on-demand services — all work together, leveraging each other's strength, to provide customers with services and solutions for all their needs.

A key aspect of Oracle's support delivery is its global spread - support centres across all major time zones around the world, providing customers with 24x7x365 support.

The Indian centre supports all three major geographies - the US, the Asia-Pacific and the Europe, West Asia and Africa region.

What are the centre's plans, near and long term?

The IT industry is growing at a blistering pace.

What is critical to any organisation's performance is how quickly it can scale up a new employee's knowledge levels to full operational delivery.

This ability to cater to customers in real time is the mainstay for the centre in the years to come.

Oracle's `on demand' software is delivered as a service to Oracle customers around the world. Oracle experts manage the customers' software to improve performance, reliability, scalability and security of their information, at Oracle premises, at the customers' location, or at third party premises.

Oracle `on demand' helps in upgrading, patching and maintaining customers' software, thereby giving them increased bandwidth.

They can, thus, focus on more strategic issues.

This service also gives customers the confidence that their software is being taken care of and helps in building longer vendor-customer relationships.

You have recently created an auto diagnostics centre. What is its function?

Auto Diagnostics is a tool through which pre-emptive measures can be taken to fix problems at the customer's end before they become acute, even before the customer realises that such a problem may occur. Through this tool, Oracle is able to predict the potential problems that a company may face within its IT infrastructure owing to the kind of business demands the organisation faces.

Oracle does this by undertaking a regular monitoring of the customer's IT infrastructure, through OWC (Oracle Web Conferencing), a technology that breaks down the barriers of distance between Customer and Support.

It allows the engineer to log into the customer's machine and experience the issues, live.

Today, over 90 per cent of Oracle's service requests are from the Web.

Auto Diagnostics is the next stage in the evolution of product support and is scheduled to be launched shortly.

How does Oracle pool its combined global strengths?

Oracle has over 6,000 support professionals. We are able to leverage efficiencies from Oracle's as well as Peoplesoft support organisations and technical infrastructures to more rapidly resolve product and technical issues.

The combined strength of Oracle, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards enables us to deliver advanced services that other support organisations cannot match.

For example, we offer customers support services in 27 languages. With integrated systems, a customer call is routed automatically to a support professional in one of 16 global hubs, which handle the issue in the language of the customer's choice.

We maintain approximately 700 representative environments in our support labs to assist with complex troubleshooting and diagnostics.

Oracle also maintains a knowledge base of more than 400,000 solutions, which address 97 per cent of customer inquiries.

Also, we are the only ERP (enterprise resource planning) provider to offer first-line support for the Linux operating system, and develop free patches and fixes that it provides to the Linux community.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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