Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) India unit is targeting to grow in triple digits for the next couple of years, on the back of the country’s economic growth and increasing spending of the middleclass on technology, top executives said. It is also betting big on the financial sector as well as government projects to drive this growth. “The Indian economy is forecast to expand nearly eight percent this year. It is by far above every other economy in the world. If you factor in the size of the economy and also the growth of the middle class, it's getting wealthier”, said Garrett Ilg, president of Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle.

This comes as Oracle’s India business has been a strong growth engine for the company with the OCI unit clocking over 100 percent growth for the third year in succession and the software-as-a-services(SaaS)business also more than doubling for each of the last two years. Garrett said the number is not an aberration and is sustainable for the next two years.“It (growth)is absolutely because(of) the momentum that is happening in the Indian market”, he said on the sidelines of the Oracle India Partner Forum event. The company views small and medium enterprises, including startups, using its NetSuite, enterprise resource planning, human capital management and data analytics products.

The Texas, US-headquartered company identifies the financial sector, due to its competitive landscape, customer base and matured micro payments systems, as a huge opportunity for growth, along with the public sector due to the push to reduce costs and extend efficient services. The tech giant said the public sector and government business was a strategic area for its growth in India.

It has worked in the Niti Aayog's aspirational districts programme of monitoring 112 most under developed districts in the country and the Income Tax Department has been using the Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions to reach out to taxpayers and to create awareness. “We are seeing government projects as a strategic area for us and will continue to invest there. Initiatives such as the Diksha programme for e-Learning and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) will be game changers”, said Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India. Within the ONDC, it is working on the secured logistics digital exchange (SLDE) that integrates buyers, sellers, banks and logistic players.

The company views small and medium enterprises, including startups, using its NetSuite, enterprise resource planning, human capital management and data analytics products

The company is adding a dedicated team to manage SaaS solutions for public sector business, said Kumar. Oracle recently closed a large project from Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation and is in discussions with state governments such as in Odisha, West Bengal, Haryana and Maharashtra for public sector projects. Oracle said it changed the approach to a subscription-based and consumption-based model from chasing big deals with big discounts. It expects this to help close the market share gap with rivals. “Oracle has modified the cloud market with our focus on consumption. We are actually looking for companies that know what they need now and then they can subscribe to more later. We don't want customers to buy big just to get a discount”, Garrett said.

According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are three top players in the market as of December 2021 – with a market share of 33 percent, 21 percent and 10 percent, respectively. The change to subscription-based business model along with its partnership with Microsoft Azure for multicloud capabilities and strong security layer in OCI Gen 2 model are “big differentiators” that the Oracle executives said would help the company gain market share. Last month, Oracle and Microsoft announced the availability of Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. With this new offering, Microsoft Azure customers can access and monitor Oracle Database services in OCI.