India driving Oracle's growth in Cloud space: Top executive

San Francisco, Sep 22: Clinching some high-value Cloud deals in countries like India in the recent past has led to Oracle looking at a solid growth in the Cloud services and solutions space in the Asia-Pacific region, a top company executive said here.

"There are multiple reasons we are experiencing this growth in the Cloud space. Clearly, the top would be that we have been able to close a number of large value Cloud deals, especially in Korea, India, Australia, Singapore, China and Sri Lanka in industries like financial services, healthcare and higher education," said François Lancon, Senior Vice President, Oracle Asia Pacific. 

He was speaking at the "Asia Pacific Media Round Table" during the Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) 2016 conference here this week.

"Customers are going live with Cloud much faster than ever. They can implement Cloud in a public, private or hybrid model and they can easily shift from on-premise to cloud, with Oracle or non-Oracle software and vice versa," Lancon added. 

According to market research firm Gartner, Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) is set to grow from $16.2 billion in 2015 to $22.4 billion in 2016 -- a 38.4 per cent year-over-year growth rate. 

"Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) is set to grow from $3.8 billion in 2015 to $4.6 billion in 2016 while Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) is set to grow from $31.4 billion in 2015 to $37.7 billion in 2016," Gartner recently predicted.

According to analysts and industry reports, the overall Cloud market in the Asia-Pacific region stands at 4.4 billion in 2016, with a 26.8 per cent year-on-year growth.

"We are recruiting more Cloud sales specialists to help support customers on their Cloud journeys. We already announced in June this year that we would hire 1,000 professionals in Asia Pacific as part of our sales transformation," Lancon noted. 

The "Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience" is one such initiative the company is focused on. 

"With this, we have made purchasing of Oracle Cloud simple and fast. Customers can effortlessly purchase Oracle Cloud services with the click of a button," he added.

For Oracle, total cloud revenue was nearly $1 billion in the first quarter this year.

According to Oracle Global CEO Safra Catz, "We are outperforming even our most aggressive expectations."

"This year, we are on track to sell more than $2 billion of SaaS and PaaS annually recurring revenue," added Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.