The aura of Oracle to envelope all of India!

As per the statement made by Mr. Charles Phillips, President, Oracle Corp., at the company’s annual networking event, called Oracle Open World, in Mumbai, the expansion will include fresh funding for existing research and development (R&D) and product development facilities in Hyderabad and Bangalore, as well as expansion of marketing and sales units. "We have been in India for 19 years and the infrastructure we have here enables us to go beyond metros cities and into up-and-coming economic engines of India. The fast rate of development, high literacy rates, and availability of IT skills in each of these cities represent an untapped reservoir of future economic wealth for India. We want to help make that happen. We rely on India for innovation. It continues to be important to us as a market, as centre of development as well as for customer facing activities." he said.

Oracle will also rewrite its software in seven new Indian languages, in order to cover all the national languages. Besides this, the company has assured that it will be flexible on payment schedules for contracts involving smaller firms or rural projects in India. Confirming this, the company's executive vice president, Mr. Derek Williams, said, " We are ready to look at alternative licensing models, some that spread payments over time and are flexible with customers who want to take strategic decisions staggered over time." Oracle has also announced that ‘B’ Category towns and cities embarking on government-sponsored e-Governance projects will be a priority sector for it, as is the fast-growing Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) segment, which is rapidly adopting new technologies. Commenting on the scope of the latest expansion he added, "It is not just product development, we are talking about consulting, worldwide support, call centres, direct sales, technical sales and analytics."

Exhibiting the same kind of faith in the country's ever-growing market, Mr. Krishan Dhawan, MD, Oracle India, said, “While India continues to be a large global product development and services centre for Oracle, it is maturing as a market for adoption of the latest technology and applications products.”

It may be noted that Oracle, one of the world's largest software companies, has already invested more than $US2 billion in the country so far. Also, the company's largest research and development centre outside the United States is located India and 15 per cent of its global workforce is based in the country.

This latest announcement for expansion comes a few months after the company President Mr. Charles Phillips remarked that he saw good growth opportunities in the fast-growing markets of China and India in October.

At the occasion, the company also announced that it was in the process of building “a suite of applications” called “Fusion Applications” to lower the cost of computing. "Customers the world over are moving away from disparate applications to standard ones. We will fuse the best of applications to build this suite," said Phillips in his keynote address.