Oracle prepares for public sector business expansion in India

Oracle is preparing for the public sector business expansion in India, now that its Mumbai and Hyderabad cloud regions have been certified for use by the government and public sector.

Following this approval from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) approval to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle hopes governments and other public sector entities in India will now use its cloud technologies and move their workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

“Oracle has been a partner to India’s development agenda for nearly three decades. Several customers are already experiencing benefits from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” said Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India.  

According to Oracle, many state governments in India including Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal already use Oracle solutions. Customers include their various departments like commercial taxes, power (meter data management), social justice (courts), urban local bodies, health, and locomotive works.

Competition is stiff in the lucrative cloud market. The Indian public cloud services market stood at $3.6 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 21.5% during 2020-25, according to research firm IDC. While Oracle competes with other public cloud players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, analysts believe it has its advantages. 

“Oracle has been working with government bodies for a long time so the existing relationship will be an advantage. Additionally, it has established local data centres in the country, so issues of data sovereignty are taken care of. It is basically helping its customers modernize their existing Oracle infrastructure,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief analyst, Greyhound Research.

Many government ministries such as Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Ministry of Railways, and Ministry of Finance also use Oracle solutions. Central government agencies and public sector undertakings like Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), Income Tax Department, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Oil Corporation, are among Oracle’s customers.

For instance, the Income Tax Department was one of the first few departments to initiate automation for improved tax filing experience and compliance. This automation led to a significant increase in the total number of individuals filing tax returns. According to Oracle, its applications, database, consulting, and partners have helped enable processing of 2.5 million returns per day. "We will be ramping up our team to support this growth in our public sector business," said Kumar. 

More than 50% of government chief information officers (CIOs) plan to increase their investments in cloud, according to Gartner’s 2021 CIO survey for governments. “The key driving factor behind this swift shift to cloud is the innovation, agility and scalability that cloud can offer. For any vendor to succeed in the public sector, it will be interesting to see if its offerings are able to demonstrate value for money. Cost effectiveness as well as faster ROI are critical metrics that the vendor needs to consider,” said Apeksha Kaushik, principal analyst, Gartner. 

Oracle, on its part, believes that government entities and public sector organizations will benefit from using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure including access to Oracle’s Autonomous Database which leverage machine learning and automation. It will also allow governments to maintain an active Disaster Recovery (DR) location and also move significant quantities of data at lower cost.