Douglas Hughes | interview we want to turn around and we want to try something; say, we are in a big end of town and we might be in one of the big banks in India, you know, ICICI or any of those that are out there. Now in the past, what they had to do was a question of hardware. Get software, get everything up and running a proof of concept. I see a lot of C-Levels now saying, it would have been nice to just link that. I mean if it works, this is where we see the platform, I see the platform and infrastructure service setting up our IT department to deliver services to their customers to make them more not just cost effective but quick in the market. We know that the history has always been that the IT department has been slow, they haven’t delivered on budget, they haven’t delivered on time, and this allows levels of flexibility. The interesting thing that is happening right now, which is a great thing about software as a service is it is Opex not Capex, and the bad thing about software as a service it is Opex not Capex.
Do you have any Indiaspecific strategy for this? How will IT heads buy in the line of business? It is interesting to watch that many IT heads are putting across their core ideas to board members and saying it would make sense if a particular task was done this way. The key change is that the C-levels have the discussion nowadays and they can choose which way they want to go and some of them will be heard and some of them will go ahead. However, there are a couple of things that CIOs can think of. They can think of starting with PaaS, which is not necessarily India-specific. However, I do see PaaS as a smart direction for India. A lot of times,
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Where do you see the direction for Indian customers from Oracle’s cloud standpoint? I see customers demand more references and proven models around Fusion. They want to see more and more customers allowing the operations on the product. They want to ensure that this continued innovation goes on and it is more about mobility. So, we have done a lot of announcements about mobility this week; mobility is very hot, social, it is not there yet but it is starting to tick in the people’s minds, and I think they also want to see if the directions taken around architectural framework make sense. However, more and more people need to start to
understand those foundations that have built up this structure and how to put it together. Customers don’t need to do away with the existing model or platform, only a part of it, and that’s what we are doing. We know companies can’t do that. There will be points in time when logical decisions will come and they can go, I will get rid of everything, all the infrastructure that is there. But there are others thinking that I can’t throw it out. I want them to focus on the big things and that is to make money. I don’t want them to just throw it off, I want them to get to the solution of the software, be it the older software or the existing products, so they are on a platform to be ready for Fusion. That’s a big one and India is pretty good at that. But getting on the lightest version is important for the key functionalities and then getting ready to deploy new products to extend their functionality, extend their capabilities. I call it extension because that’s what we are doing. You are applying IT functionality into areas that are currently not applied and there is value there. Some questions that can be asked are: What’s my return on investments on upgrading my financials? I don’t know. What’s my return on investment on the talent management system? If I can save three people, I have already started to see a lot of money coming in. At this point, getting customers to Fusion is a slow process and we just have 100 customers. Rewriting Fusion was a big job. We didn’t think when we started that we would have to rewrite from scratch and how big this would be. This is the first rewrite of enterprise software in 25 years by anyone.
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