On a recent visit to India, Francois Xavier Leclercq, Senior Vice-President, Business Development EMEA and APAC Applications, Oracle, spoke to BusinessLine about the market here, customers of Oracle’s Software as a Service (SaaS), and the competition. Excerpts:

What has your experience been in a market like India?

India is an important market for us. A lot of things are happening in India. We see disruption and the need for many companies in financial services, we see that in industry and manufacturing, we see that in start-ups.

In a lot of markets, there is a big demand for SaaS. We have been doing extremely well in India because in the last two-three years, we have had more than double-digit growth in the market, specifically for our SaaS solution.

We are in a very good position to get market share in India. We are growing at least three times more than our closest competitor in SaaS.

What is your go-to-market strategy here right now?

The top five conglomerates and four-five top private banks in India are customers of our SaaS solutions. Many start-ups and unicorns are already using our solutions.

We have some companies in India that are not using Oracle. But what we want to show them is that we have innovation and a platform of applications that is way more advanced.

Our belief is that the competition is not yet at the (same) level in terms of breadth, completeness of suite.

All the analysts are seeing Oracle on top. We want to take care of our top customers and facilitate their move to the cloud.

And what about small and medium businesses?

We have two suites of applications. One is for big companies that are growing fast.

We have another target, which is to go after the bottom of the market — the very small and mid-size companies below $100 million in terms of revenue.

Some companies are using both — Netsuite for their small divisions, and ERP cloud at the headquarters.

Thoughts on the competition in India, especially home-grown SaaS companies...

I like the market where you have a lot of companies investing, and start-ups and home-grown solutions, because it means there is a market.

The growth we could have in India is linked to this. I think you have some choice for many solutions.

I believe that in the SaaS solutions’ space, getting the customer’s perspective is very important. I respect the home-grown solutions in the Indian market.

But I believe that if you are serious about the business, if you want to grow internationally or even in India, and you start to have a lot of customers, you need something which is very scalable.

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