Oracle OpenWorld is an annual convention covering major economic centers of the world and bringing together top Oracle executives, business decision makers, IT management and line of business end users

Oracle brought the OpenWorld event format to India for the first time this year with plans to making it a regular event on its calendar for India.



The maiden event was attended by Safra Catz, co-CEO of Oracle where she delivered the keynote session, addressed the media and also had a few breakout sessions. The event was also attended by Devendra Fadnavis, the honorable Chief Minister of Maharastra.





Oracle announced its plans for the India Product development operations & also shared some of the recent wins they had in the Indian market.





Expanding India R&D operations

Oracle already has significant product development operations in India with about 40,000 plus employees spread across R&D centers located in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, NCR and the latest addition, Ahmedabad. During the press briefing; Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz announced that Oracle plans to expand its India operations by investing around $400 million in its India operations.





This announcement is welcome for India as the Indian IT industry is facing the headwinds of de-globalization across the developed world. India R&D operations support the Silicon Valley-based giant in its endeavor to establish absolute leadership across the entire stack of cloud portfolio, i.e., IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.





Digital India: Massive opportunity

This was Safra Catz second visit to India. Her first visit was in February 2016, when she met Prime minister Narendra Modi, who also inaugurated the brand-new R&D facility from Oracle at Ahmedabad, Gujara.



Subsequent to her India visit in Feb. 2016, Devendra Fadnavis attended the Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco event toward the end of 2016, leading to an MoU between Oracle and the Indian state of Maharashtra.





At this year’s OpenWorld 2017 in India, Oracle invited Devendra Fadnavis, to present him Oracle’s Digital transformation award for India. Just a day before, at the New Delhi OpenWorld event, on 8th May, Oracle signed an MoU with the government of Jharkhand to enable e-governance through the digital transformation projects.





Devendra Fadnavis laid out Digital India plans for Maharashtra on the G2G and G2C front. He spoke about complete automation of G2G processes by integrating various governments together using Oracle’s technology. The honorable CM also announced that around 370 citizen services were made available on the Internet via the Right to Service Act initiative “AapleSarkar” portal.





Safra Catz said that Oracle is committed to participating in vision laid down by PM Narendra Modi of a digital India. She mentioned that Oracle has a product catalog that can bring immense value to the Digital India initiative; almost placing Oracle in a unique position to service the almost all digital transformation requirements of the Digital India program.





To tap into this massive opportunity, Oracle has plans to setup data centers in India, which is a major pre-requisite for any Indian e-governance project. Safra Catz did not disclose where the data centers would be commissioned, but most likely that will be announced very soon.





During the press briefing, Safra Catz also mentioned that the Government of India is hungry for technology and Oracle is committed to offer its best technology products to the Indian government.





Focus on SMEs

Oracle has offerings across the entire cloud stack with a modern IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings. Oracle is ramping up its sales operations to target the SME market in India. In fact, Oracle has created a separate sales organization for the same. This is in line with Oracle’s focus on SME market as a primary driver for growth globally with the recent acquisition of NetSuite, an ERP product made for meeting the requirements of SMEs.





Among other announcements was the general availability of the GST support in its ERP cloud products. Oracle had already made the GST support available to its on-premise customers through a patch in early February 2017.





Safra Catz also mentioned the on-going commitment of Oracle toward incubating startups in India. She mentioned that Oracle has nine startup incubation centers across India. Oracle supports the startup by giving them the technology to build innovative applications and platforms.





Oracle senior executives support the Startup initiative by providing expert guidance and business advice to the startups.





Summing up, Oracle displayed its end to end offering during the OpenWorld 2017, right from bare metal hardware to network level to industry specific applications. Bringing OpenWorld to India is a testament to the fact that India is a huge growth market for Oracle right from the big multinational enterprises to the public sector and the small and medium enterprises.