The Hindu Business Line : `Built for scalability'

Scalability - that's the challenge software players face in India's eGovernance space, Oracle's Adaire Fox Martin tells eWorld. And Oracle's ready for it.

Adaire Fox Martin

IF the aggressive India plans unveiled by global IT giants such as Microsoft, Intel, and AMD ended the year 2005 on a high note, Oracle's announcement in January 2006 to hire 1,400 people in the country, as part of its efforts to expand operations to nine more cites, set the tone for the new year.

Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, said at its global technology and business conference, Oracle OpenWorld held in Mumbai recently, that it plans to hire people in product development, sales and marketing, consulting, product support and services.

eWorld caught up with Adaire Fox Martin, Vice-President, Government, Education and Healthcare, Oracle Corporation-Asia-Pacific Division, to find out more about the company's strategy for India.

Within the Government space, which are the States Oracle is currently working with?

We have a dedicated industry team in place. We operate in a vast majority of States such as Assam, Orissa, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat and West Bengal, amongst others.

Could your spell out the details of the specific projects that you are working on in these States? Are they in the pilot stage, or have they already been rolled out?

First of all, let me say that a lot of work that we do in India is with partners, including TCS and Satyam, because there is a lot of custom development work that happens. A lot of things we do revolves around VAT collection, utility bill payment, treasury management for the Centre, e-governance portals and all of those.

We look at the architecture and try and advise them (the Government). One of the advantages that India has over the developed markets is that many of the developed markets already have systems in place.

For instance, before e-governance became a hit, a lot of places such as Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, if you just take the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, had legacy systems or proprietary systems in place and also had a strong sense of data ownership.

By contrast, India had an opportunity to start afresh. In India, the approach to the various projects that we have done — be it VAT or customs — is much like building a house where we are trying to say `look at the capacity of your State and what you need architecturally to build the foundation, and we will help you put the room and put doors and windows. But make sure that the foundation is right.'

By saying this, I mean that there are things like considering how you store data so that you store it once essentially, if possible. However, that is not always possible in India's infrastructure, particularly in some States where there are far-flung government entities that need to relay (constantly communicate) to the Centre.

Consider things like citizen information — how are you going to store, who will own it, because the value of data increases exponentially as you centralise it.

So these are some of the architectural things that we consider. We have been investing in capacity building and capacity planning workshops.

One of the things that I have found generally in my experience in 3-4 years is that when we go and meet people — and I have not met people who have more fantastic ideas and plans and oceans of power point presentations — sometimes the actual execution does not happen.

When we invest in these capacity-building workshops, we tell the Governments that what we want in return is that you give us the right people. That we do not want you to pay for this but you give us the right mind share.

We take a look at all the PowerPoints and ideas, and we prioritise them. See the overall vision and then say what architecture will be needed to support their vision.

It is not a case of saying that you — the Government — will have to build everything at one go. It is generally a stage by stage approach.

What are the new projects Oracle will be bidding for in the Government segment this year?

Some of them are concepts that we are working on. For instance, we are looking at things like the citizen data hubs and how large agencies that have big data management issues, such as the electoral commission, could use those concepts.

What are the biggest challenges that you face in the Government and education space in India and how does it compare with the worldwide scenario in similar spaces?

In the Government space in India, a major challenge will be moving from pilot to mass rollout.

One of the challenges we will see in the area is that the sheer size of Ministries, Departments, agencies, and of the citizen community is going to test the scalability of software. And I think Oracle is the only company that can meet those challenges. We are gearing ourselves up for the test.

But first of all I hope the actual deployment happens, if it does we willbe looking at a huge deployment entailing a large number of users and the only other market that is comparable is China.

In the education space, we have some very significant offerings in the K-12 space, and in the higher education space as well. The acquisition of PeopleSoft gave us a campus solution product that we did not have earlier.

The challenge that we have in education now is that the offerings that we would have for schools are dependent on a particular infrastructure being in place.

This is true in respect of some States, not so for others. So I guess it will be a stage by stage rollout.

moumita@thehindu.co.in

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