Companies big and small around the world may have cut IT spending in the backdrop of a slowing economy and geopolitical uncertainties, but they continue to allocate budgets in two areas— cloud computing and security—according to technology giant Oracle.
"Today cloud and security are two areas where people are still allocating budgets. But, at the same time, they are monitoring performances to see are they optimising, are they getting efficiency...," said Srikanth Doranadula, group vice-president, technology, Oracle India.
In India too, Oracle continues to see strong growth as more and more companies, including small and medium enterprises, embrace technology and shift at least some of their products and services to the cloud.
"If you look at our cloud business per se, it has been a 100 per cent growth year-on-year. Renewals are also in excess of 70-75 per cent. SMB (small and mid size businesses) space we have looked at more than 70 per cent growth currently," said Doranadula.
The company's Exadata cloud@customer offering (Oracle brings cloud capabilities to a company's data centre to modernise databases and optimise hybrid environment) has seen over 380 per cent jump in the second quarter, according to him.
The growth in Oracle's cloud offerings has been broad-based across different sectors, from public sector to banking and financial services firms, healthcare companies and the startup space, Doranadula added.
Oracle officials say India is a focus market for the company and it will continue to look at localising its offerings for customers here.
"We understand that a lot of localisation needs are there for our customers. Because India is a focus market, growing market, we are making strategic investments here," said Deepa Param Singhal, vice-president, cloud applications, Oracle India, without sharing any specific numbers.
There is also a lot of demand coming in for generative AI (artificial intelligence) from customers, said Singhal.
"Trends show that jobs in gen AI are going to go up significantly. Every industry has a use case of adopting it," she noted.
Oracle doesn't share India-specific data. But, announcing the second quarter results in December, Safra Catz, CEO, Oracle, had said the company's global cloud business was at a nearly $20 billion annual revenue run-rate and cloud services demand continued to grow at unprecedented levels.
Catz has announced plans to expand 66 of its existing data centres and build 100 new cloud data centres to meet growing demand.
In India, Oracle had launched its first data centre in Mumbai in 2019 and quickly followed that up with another data centre in Hyderabad in 2020.