Date:11/01/2006 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/01/11/stories/2006011102980400.htm

Back Oracle `relies on India team for innovation'

Our Bureau

Mr Charles E. Phillips (left), Jr. President, Oracle Corporation, and Mr Derek Williams, Executive Vice- President, Asia Pacific Division,, Oracle, at a press conference in Mumbai on Tuesday. - - Paul Noronha

Mumbai , Jan. 10

BULLISH on the growth prospects of the Indian market, Oracle Corporation plans to scale up its headcount in the country to 10,000 professionals from the current 8,600, while establishing direct presence in nine non-metro cities during the next eight months.

The company, which has already invested $2 billion in India over the last five years, plans to hire people in product development, sales and marketing, consulting, product support and services, said Mr Charles Phillips, President, Oracle Corporation, at the Oracle OpenWorld conference, here on Tuesday.

"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. At present, the company employs 17 per cent of the company's global workforce of 51,000 in India.

"You are seeing our confidence in India through our expansion plans. We have been in India for more than 19 years and the infrastructure we have put in place now enables us to go beyond the metro cities and into cities that are upcoming economic engines," said Mr Derek Williams, executive Vice-President, Oracle Asia Pacific. The company also had plans to increase its partner network to support its reach across all 15 cities and industry segments, particularly the small and medium-sized enterprise market.

The role of partners in the company's Oracle's strategy can well be gauged from the fact that about 80 per cent of Oracle's licence revenues in India is generated through partners.

Oracle further said that it expected the next wave of opportunity to come from the rural market. On the role of Oracle's India development centre in project Fusion — a next-generation information-oriented architecture and application set supporting the best features, flows, and usability of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards products, he said, "It has been involved in several portions of middleware."

Mr Phillips denied that the company had faced problems in the integration of Peoplesoft, saying, "Based on financial results and customer feedback, we think it has been a resounding success."

On the response to Oracle's open offer for acquiring 20 per cent stake in Indian banking software company i-flex Solutions from public shareholders, Mr Phillips admitted that the response had been fairly small.