Oracle Corporation, which runs a 2,000-man global development, consulting, sales and support operation out of India, is planning to double its strength in the country.
"India is incredibly important to Oracle," says Derek Williams, executive vice-president of Oracle, Asia-Pacific. He was speaking at a media Q&A in Beijing on Wednesday, where the $11 billion Oracle Corp, the world's largest database and enterprise software company, is showcasing its OracleWorld event.
While Williams declined to put any timeframe to the expansion in developer strength in India, he said it was an ongoing process, and "we may be recruiting even today". India is important because it is the biggest global development and support centre for Oracle outside of the US.
Oracle in India runs development centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad, as well as marketing and global support services. Of Oracle's global development efforts, some 40 per cent happens out of Asia, of which India is the major contributor.
Apart from contributing to Oracle's core research and development, Williams sees India as "a very vibrant market" for its products in the future as the country globalises and embraces web-based technologies.
Oracle sees the e-governance area as a major driver of business growth in India. Williams says e-governance is beginning to happen in some states, but no so much at the Centre. Currently, India is not among Oracle's top three markets in Asia. The top three markets in Asia are Japan, Korea and China, in that order. But over the next 5-10 years, this could change with China moving to No 2 and India to No 3.
Oracle considers itself the largest software company in open-standard Net-based technologies, and feels that Indian engineers will play a major role in keeping Oracle ahead.
Despite the current gloom in the Indian call centres market, Oracle is bullish about the business' future. "We see significant opportunities in call centres - more in India than in the rest of Asia," says Williams. Even more important, India has the potential to be a "world leader" in business process outsourcing, which big Indian companies -- from Infosys to ICICI Bank - have targeted for diversification and growth.
Oracle itself is getting into the outsourcing business - but currently limits itself to only Oracle products. This means that it will offer to run data centres that run on Oracle software like its 9i database as an outsourced service to companies. "Outsourcing is our core strategy for financial year 2003," says Williams. Oracle's financial year runs from June-May.
Not that India will not have competition. To seed the Chinese market - which is currently growing faster than India's - Oracle has set up two development centres in China (at Shenzhen and Beijing), but given the huge customisation efforts required to adapt anything in Chinese, most of the initial efforts of these development centres may be targeted at the Chinese market. While the Shenzhen development centre will target Chinese commercial enterprises, the Beijing one will look at expanding business to the e-governance sector, says Williams.
About the slowdown in technology spending, Williams declined to hazard a guess as to when it would reverse. According to him, the one thing that has changed is that companies are dusting up plans to invest in technology projects - but these are still being shot down at the board level due to uncertainties about the strength of the US recovery and, more importantly, about corporate profitability.
Oracle chief financial officer Jeff Henley says that the current slowdown in tech spending was probably "the worst since 1974-75" and had resulted from overspending during the dotcom boom and the current lack of economic growth. While there were some signs of a revival in the US, it hadn't yet showed up in tech spending. He did not expect any revival in tech spending till 2003.
