Oracle launches second cloud region in India

BENGALURU: Oracle on Monday announced the launch of its second data centre region in India, in Hyderabad. It comes seven months after the launch of the first in Mumbai.
The service competes with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, and the launches in quick succession show how rapidly companies are taking their digital workloads to the cloud.
“Mumbai is one of our fastest growing cloud regions,” Vinay Kumar, VP of product management for Oracle cloud infrastructure, told TOI from the US, where he is based.Week-on-week, there’s a 5-10% growth in cloud workloads in India, which is massive, he said. Globally, Oracle has 24 cloud regions, and this is expected to be 36 by the end of 2020.
Two cloud regions will allow Indian customers to have one as their production site, and the other as a disaster recovery site. “They are across two seismic zones, interconnected by a very low latency Oracle backbone,” said Shailender Kumar, MD of Oracle India, at a virtual press conference on Monday.
Oracle has some 15,000 customers in India, and a massive installed base of databases and other products. Most of these are on-premise, but are now fast moving to the cloud. Vinay Kumar said Oracle cloud would be the preferred choice to move them to, because other clouds (AWS, Azure) are not optimised to run them.
Manappuram Finance, one of India’s leading NBFCs, was among the first to be in the Hyderabad cloud. The company’s president of IT, Saiprasad Sivadasan, said at the press conference that given the size and diversity of the group, and the speed of changes, predictability of IT capital expenditure was becoming very difficult. “And we wanted modern technologies. So the only way was the cloud,” he said. Based on workloads that have already moved to Oracle cloud, Sivadasan said there have been 2x-3x performance improvements compared to the older IT setup. He also expects 30-40% cost savings over the next five years.
Pinkesh Ambavat, CIO of credit bureau CRIF India, which too is moving to Oracle cloud, said that on-premise capacity planning was becoming very difficult, and the need for continuous innovation and continuous improvement required scalable infrastructure that was possible only on the cloud. He expects at least 3x improvement in performance compared to the current IT setup, and 30% additional cost savings in the next three years.
Vinay Kumar said Oracle is pricing its infrastructure significantly lower than competition. “Our network bandwidth costs are 80% lower than AWS. Network should not be a barrier to move to the cloud. We will make money on our databases and other offerings,” he said.