Oracle India on Thursday launched new servers called Sparc T5 and M5, that the company says are the world’s fastest processor with up to three times faster application performance than competing platforms.

The launch comes even as the company faces a challenging market combined with aggressive competition from the likes of SAP and IBM. In an interview with Business Line , Sandeep Mathur, Managing Director, Oracle India, talks about the company’s outlook for the Indian market. -

How is Indian market shaping up for Oracle?

We run the most critical systems in the country today and touch millions of Indians through our system. Every telecom company, bank and biggest transaction processing systems in the public sector or anywhere you go, run on Oracle. It could be our infrastructure, databases, middleware or applications. We are up to it and keep on releasing new products and technologies like the T5 and M5 to do that because of our focus around customers’ need and desire.

Is India market becoming more relevant for Oracle?

India is been the key market for two reasons. One is from talent standpoint and we have a vast pool of resources in India, which contribute to our research and development.

We have more than 30,000 employees in India, which is why it is been important for us. From business point of view, we have world’s biggest database for banking and transactions systems, customer relationship management systems, which are running in India.

Does being hardware-plus-software company give you leverage?

It gives us leverage plus responsibility. We have decided to go a way of ‘I respect your choice’. We could have also gone the other way, which is ‘I don’t care about you. I have this and this is the only thing you are going to buy’.

Fortunately, we did not go the other way, and went and said ‘we will offer you a choice’ and every point in time, I will ensure that in each one of my product categories, I do a better job than I have done before.

It actually becomes interesting when you add the price angle to it and that’s how the CIOs do take a decision. It’s about looking at what technology can do for them and at what cost.

How do you see competition from new age companies like Salesforce.com?

We have been in this market since early 1990s and have an understanding about India as a market place. Salesforce.com or any of the other companies are software-as-a-service (SAS) providers who can only provide SAS solutions. Secondly, once they have come in, have learned the lessons and either scaled down the operation or gone back to never come back or to come back in a different avatar. The global dynamic might be different, but from Indian dynamic perspective, we don’t see too many of these.

What kind of discussions are you having with telecom companies?

There is a huge transformation that is starting to happen. Companies are now thinking am I just going to be pipe or can I do more – produce more applications to increase the utilisation of data. Whole customer experience is starting to look different and new areas like machine-to-machine are starting to gain popularity.

>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in

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