Interaction- Satyendra Pasalapudi, MD, INFOLOB Global Inc

How's your journey going on with the Oracle? From Oracle's Goa event to now, how many logos have you added?

The ecosystem that Larry Ellison and Oracle have created is evergreen and will always be beneficial for user enterprises as well as enablement and management practitioners such as my team at INFOLOB. Since we last interacted at the Oracle Partner Event in Goa 2022. We have added almost 100+ logos [BS1] [AV2] to date with Data Center Exit to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure taking industries by storm. On the other hand, OCI itself has made a significant impact by being the only gen2 hyperscaler in the world, with maximum cloud regions. It is a purpose-built, enterprise-grade public cloud.  For large enterprises that were leveraging Oracle Exadata, OCI is the only Public Cloud to move its database service to with same Exadata feature functionality as a service.. This is where we are very successful in migrating large data centers onto the OCI for our customers. 

Our recent success at Max Life is a classic example where their entire core insurance application has been migrated to OCI. Team INFOLOB performed seamless migration from IBM AIX to scalable Exadata Cloud Service (ExaCS). 

Max Life's heart of applications and data is currently running on OCI. As Max Life envisioned to accelerate the digital transformation journey, cloud technologies will be the key to enhancing the performance and availability of core applications for a better customer experience. By partnering with INFOLOB for Exadata on OCI migration, the insurer has capitalized their market which helped them to align growth trajectory. Such a transition has improved the performance of the insurance player across all workloads, optimized costs, and reduced downtimes. Since hybrid and multi-cloud environments are redefining IT strategies, they continue to address IT redundancies with unparalleled flexibility, facilitating exponential business growth.

Also, BFSI and NBFCs (non-banking financial institutions) are major verticals where we are performing a lot of migrations of their data centers to OCI. Looking at these successful projects, we believe OCI is thriving in India, and we will continue to help our customers migrate and continuously manage their cloud infrastructure. 

We also have a super successful SaaS practice where we have implemented Oracle ERP and Fusion Financials, Fusion HCM for a rapidly growing number of customers across India and the Middle East.

As discussed about Max Life, So what are the other recent wins in OCI and what role has INFOLOB played in navigating the various challenges of the customers?

Whenever a presales activity happens with customers the first and foremost doubt in customer’s minds on their cloud journey is about security. We offer our solutions on OCI with security as paramount and provide them with a completely secured environment on OCI with CIS Standard landing zones and ensuring their on-premise architecture along with firewalls and secured data transfer across VCNs with traffic monitoring across North South and East West via these Firewalls. We ensure whatever they are running on-premises matches with the cloud, and we give the confidence that they can run their core operations as-is without any security concerns adhering to the laws of the land.

Most enterprises are under tremendous cost pressure, and they wish to innovate on the cloud. Also, there are several migrations we performed from AWS to OCI. As part of this, our recent win is a customer who moved their Cloudera on AWS to OCI. Implementing the migration strategies with the capability of Oracle Autonomous Datawarehouse and OCI Data Flow opens possible advantages as serverless architecture on OCI features with  real-time reporting. Gone are the days when the reporting would happen every 24 hours. Along with real-time analytics/reporting, data lakes on OCI are known for their cost-effectiveness and highly performant.

The other important aspect is customers who run Oracle workloads either in their own data center or other public clouds, one can gain by moving their Oracle workloads to OCI, here are the three main benefits that everyone can see:

1. When you see other hyperscalers with Oracle, there is a definitive reduction in costs in terms of Price Performance ratio.
2. When compared to OCI, the licensing costs on other clouds for running Oracle workloads are mounted by 2X. When the same workloads are deployed on OCI, one can save 100% on cloud licensing costs.
3. One can save up to 33% on their Annual Technology support fees that are paid yearly. This is known to be Oracle Support Rewards.

Considering these benefits, CIOs are working on a long-term plan, especially on cloud spend globally, because costs have become a major concern among small to large-scale enterprises. Since the evolution of multi-cloud, OCI has been dominating other players. 

For some of our customers, we have seen a huge spike in business growth with zero investment in the cloud. Because ExaCC or ExaCS can take maximum load thus avoiding re-investments to scale up. Indeed, the associated infrastructure that's built around Exadata is the crux for data center exits which we have observed across.

Describe the role INFOLOB is playing in implementing some of the recent projects that you have mentioned, and how long did the migration take?

We follow a definitive cloud migration methodology and framework. When there are hundreds of workloads to be migrated that rely on 300+ servers, there is no possibility that it will happen overnight. So, we have our Migration Framework which is divided into multiple move groups after a thorough 3-dimensional analysis with the customer without impacting the business and reducing downtime. 

• Define - We work with the Oracle engineering team and our pre-sales team to win the contract and build the actual plan to continue to the design phase.
• Design - Here we analyze the feasibility of their cloud to OCI considering existing third-party applications. We also perform three-dimensional analysis focusing on business, technology assessment, and software. 
• Deliver - We then come up with “Move Groups” where we prioritize what to move first depending on the business needs. All this is to ensure minimal disruptions to the business when we are moving the entire data center to the cloud. Integration is a major player where it communicates multiple things. Our teams spend quality time with customers and then arrive at this move-group plan. 
• Drive - Then we migrate them, making the cloud transition successful. Later, we manage them continuously on a cloud because they might have an IT staff who may not hold expertise on OCI. So, the cloud-managed services are our part as an extended supporting partner.

We have a tooling approach for monitoring the cloud. We have Cloud Guardian (Security & Governance Portal), an in-house product built which augments the Cloud Guard of Oracle. This helps us to know the security posture of the customer, their controls, and threats as part of our Cloud Managed Services.

INFOLOB's association with Oracle has been since 2009. How Oracle is helping and contributing towards growing the business?

We have been focused on Exadata since 2009 at our headquarters in Texas, USA. In India, we started in 2021 and team size went up from 25 to 350+ across Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Dubai, Saudi, and Qatar. We have 100+ happy customers supported by us on OCI and other cloud implementations. The other advantage is that we haven't invested in Salesforce heavily. Rather, we invested in technical teams who can do the DC Exits so that customers can approach INFOLOB and utilize the entire database and its services. We ensure quality deliveries, which in turn helps the business rather than sales. We jointly work towards performing major cloud implementations. 

Thanks to the partner ecosystem, alliances team, and sales team at Oracle – where we have a monthly cadence across, working towards the same goal, which is Oracle Cloud’s gain. Oracle needs partners like INFOLOB to make cloud transformation a huge success. We have seen a change from the beginning to now in how partner-friendly Oracle is transforming. Earlier it was a product business which is a little tough but when it comes to the cloud, we can see the change in how they treat partners. 

The two things we ensure are elite quality support for the customers and technology improvements as a constant process. I drive my team to learn constantly. We have done 800+ Oracle Certifications, that's why we believe in our teams directing flawless Oracle implementations so far.

What are the top channel directions that your company has set for your customers? and what are the GTM strategies for the business?

When we look at any customer, it is not that we simply offer technical resources and are passive. We focus on solutions where we want to be an extended IT team. More than customers, we recognize them as our partners and aspire to be an extended arm of IT taking care of their infrastructure. INFOLOB focuses on complete cloud infrastructure while enterprises can focus on their business. 

In the go-to strategy, DC exit was our foremost strategy two years back and today in the market, DC exit is seen as a sales play. However, we focus majorly on the latest evolutions such as Gen AI which accelerates the performance of the data lake on OCI. 

INFOLOB is continuously adapting to futuristic technologies and is driven by a solutions mindset which is one of our GTM strategies. We provide end-to-end Oracle HCM or ERP solutions, ensuring the success of the customer in implementing these cloud-based applications. 

Another GTM strategy is social media, particularly INFOLOB's Linkedin, where our experts produce thought leadership articles on the cloud and its technologies that give us a lot of value. I approach my team to produce such concepts and that's how we tap into major industry players. In conclusion, it's all about less sales effort and more technology effort that's helping us to move forward.

As you have mentioned GenAI, how are small partners particularly, getting the training and enablement of the latest technologies?

Small partners feel heavy when it comes to investing in practical things. As we're working closely with Oracle, they are coming up with labs where partners can play with their data, thereby developing solutions around how large language models can be fine-tuned and augmented with the data. It's not a simple aspect but specific to the customers. 

We have a 25-member data engineering team to target the aforementioned. We aim to work on two aspects: one is 50+ Gen AI features that have been included in ERP with fusion apps and we are building our teams to implement them for customers. We update our knowledge with our implementation consultants to see how they leverage these solutions.

Second, we are working on how to customize and fine-tune the Large Language Models with customers' data using Retrieval Augmented Generation where we focus on creating use cases on different verticals so that we can project into the market in a big way. This is where partners need help on infrastructure to navigate Gen AI and other futuristic technologies to build competent solutions and business as well.                                 

In terms of numbers, How has Infolob Global's growth in the last two to three years, working with Oracle on OCI?

We see that OCI is growing 200% year on year as we are an exclusive OCI partner. Because of the references we get every year, almost 4 major migrations will be implemented by INFOLOB. Large NBFCs and Banks are our recent examples. Soon after migration, we also provided managed services 24x7. This is where in terms of the size of the teams and business, we are growing aggressively.

Can you please highlight three technology trends? You know that the channel community looks forward to it?

Cloud is the foremost trend that every enterprise relies on, and it is successful because of its capability to innovate faster. There is a tooling mechanism where governance and cloud spending can be tracked on the FinOps end. So, we created our product - Heeddata, which gives visibility across all four cloud platforms - AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle. Now, Heeddata helps in optimizing cloud resources over the management.

Think of how Gen AI is accelerating the enterprises' future whereas multi-cloud is another trend and the partnership between Azure and Oracle is a great example of it. Multi-cloud, FinOps, and AI are three technology trends where organizations see potential growth and value. Oracle also invested heavily on MySQL Heatwave which lets enterprises seamlessly leverage one of the world’s most popular databases for their OLTP and LAP workloads in real-time. Heatwave is a scalable, distributed, in-memory, and share-nothing query accelerator where one can overcome the traditional data warehouse and analytics environments with an effort to achieve performance by 400X. Our teams are working with many people across India, the Middle East, and the US as well to embrace MySQL with Heatwave.

As a partner, where do you see the maximum traction on cloud technology, or where do you think digital transformation is heading?

The maximum transformation is within agile hardware where it gets refreshed every few hours and can scale. Most of the customers who are operating on Solaris, AIX, HP, and UNIX are thinking of cloud potential. INFOLOB is specialized in migrating these non-Linux or Windows databases onto the cloud with minimal disruptions. Max Life is one such example where they relied on AIX, and we helped in their migration to Exadata on OCI with minimal downtime. Enterprises that rely on old-modeled architecture and hardware are looking forward to migrating to the cloud, and that's where we see a lot of traction, especially on infrastructure. 

So far, only OCI supports Exadata and now Azure is also working on the possibilities. Once a business is into Exadata, its entire business flow will have superior computing experience along with handling workloads. And there's continuous innovation in Oracle right from the launch of ExaCS or ExaCC - a fantastic innovation and RDMA cluster along with GPU scaling is the crux for Oracle running Bing and Nvidia. This is where I see a lot of enterprises use Exadata while gaining innovation momentum through GenAI or AI use cases. 

If we talk about vertical, where has INFOLOB been heading recently?

In our journey so far, 80% of customers are from BFSI. Though it was unplanned, most of the banks and insurance providers are on the cloud because RBI has opened feasibilities towards cloud adoption and the growth rate is very fast. The BFSI sector needs to scale its platform as the number of users mounts up year on year and OCI can only provide scalability with ExaCS or ExaCC. That's where a lot of BFSI and NBFCs are looking forward and we see huge potential on a global scale.

The main challenge of SMBs is that they are not aware of the technology and they have some budget constraints. So how are INFOLOB and Oracle jointly managing these challenges?

The growth of SMBs is very fast but the only challenge is they don’t realize it sooner because they believe that Oracle is expensive. However, Oracle is affordable among the four hyperscalers. Since there's a lack of awareness and they need partners who can support them, OCI is best in terms of deploying cloud-native applications and all these SMBs can run their applications seamlessly on the cloud.

One can handle Oracle and non-Oracle workloads within a single cloud platform that makes it economical, faster, super performant, boosted price performant, and egress. These are a few aspects that everyone must look forward to. Personally, I have seen some SMBs who have grown by 300%-400% year on year and Oracle also added a lot of SMB logos. On the same plane, INFOLOB is also working closely and forecasting the potential to grow heavily in the near future.