Oracle launches dedicated OCI region for India market

US-based technology major Oracle’s cloud services platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has launched a new offering, ‘OCI dedicated Region’ for the India market, to offer public cloud services to customers on their premises.

The new offering will help customers meet latency, data residency, and data sovereignty requirements that are key to many IT modernisation efforts. It will also allow Oracle to offer customers nearly 100 services within their premises, which were earlier available only to public cloud consumers.

“The new OCI Dedicated Region requires 60%-75% less data centre space and power on average, with a significantly lower entry price of around $1 million a year for a typical customer,” Kapil Makhija, Vice-President -Technology Cloud, Oracle India, told Tech Circle.

He added that with the new offering, the company can now offer cloud services at customers’ doorstep instead of Oracle’s public cloud data centres. It will also help boost public cloud adoption for enterprises in public sector, banking and other sectors that were so far unable to do so because of regulatory and other requirements.

According to Makhija, digitisation in the government sector has seen a phenomenal rise in the last one year than the last three years combined. “Our public sector business continues to be a very important contributor to our overall business, as we see a lot more acceptance in governments and public sector companies - both centre and state - in terms of cloud adoption,” he said.

He added that over the past few years, the company has been able to successfully run proof-of-concepts, to display the power of cloud for a variety of government specific applications – in different departments.

“Many governments in India already run so many Oracle solutions including departments like commercial taxes, power (meter data management), social justice (courts), urban local bodies, health, locomotive works and more. So, this transition to cloud will help them not only dramatically improve their Oracle software efficiencies but will also help them lower their operational costs and manage their otherwise, human-intensive tech maintenance time, in a much smarter way,” he said.

India’s public cloud services market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), revenue totalled $4.6 billion for July-December 2021, said research firm International Data Corporation (IDC). The overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach $13.5 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 24% during 2021-26, it said.

Globally, customers including Nomura Research Institute and Vodafone have chosen OCI Dedicated Region to cater to their specific requirements.