Oracle to increase headcount to 2,000 in 5 cities

Oracle India is focusing strongly on tier-2 cities and plans to set up operations in Chandigarh, Lucknow, Jaipur, Bhopal and Thiruvanthapuram in the next few weeks. It plans to recruit 200 people in these cities taking Oracle’s overall India headcount to over 2000. Last year, Oracle set up operations in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Kolkata.

Under a branch director and with 20 people in each, these operations will focus entire Gujarat (Ahmedabad), Andhra and Telengana (Hyderabad), Rest of Maharashtra except Mumbai (Pune), Tamil Nadu (Chennai) and East and North-East (Kolkata). The new centers would focus on Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand (Chandigarh), UP (Lucknow), Rajasthan (Jaipur), MP and Chhattisgarh (Bhopal) and Kerala (Thiruvanthapuram). Most of these operations would work closely with Oracle’s partners under its OPN program.

Oracle India’s Partner Network (OPN) programs would focus on areas like cloud, engineered systems, Oracle-on-Oracle and enterprise mobility during 2015. Under the OPN program, Oracle is currently handling 6,500 partners in whole of APAC with about 1000 of them in India; while there are distribution agreements with 3000 of them, the rest are functioning as ISVs and system integrators.

“These channel partners are an important lifeline of our business and they have been especially instrumental in expanding our engineered systems and cloud business in India,” reiterated Shailender Kumar, MD, Oracle India at the sidelines of the Oracle India Partner Forum (IPF 2015) in Bangkok from January 7-9. Under OPN, Oracle India categorizes partners as global system integrators (this includes Indian SIs like Wipro, TCS, Infosys and EMEA/US based SIs like Accenture, KPMG and PwC), ISVs (for both technology products and solution products) and resellers. The reseller base has expanded significantly in the last one year mainly with most erstwhile Sun partners coming into the fold.

Currently, 40% of Oracle’s India revenues come from its 18 key accounts which includes the likes of Reliance, HDFC and BSNL.  The partner involvement in key accounts might be restricted, but they play a major role in Oracle’s 600 named accounts that accounts for 20% of its revenues as well as the commercial business that accounts for another 20%. The remaining 20% comes from the PSU business.

(The author was hosted in Bangkok by Oracle)