Oracle to focus on new growth verticals
By agencies   |   Monday, 11 July 2005, 19:30 IST
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JAIPUR: Enterprise applications major Oracle is strongly focusing on emerging high-potential verticals such as retail, auto and textile, encouraged by strong growth in the India business, last fiscal. Briefing reporters at a media education event in Jaipur, Krishan Dhawan, MD, Oracle India said, “ FY05 was the best year for us in the last five years. We saw good growth in verticals like FSI, telecom, government and manufacturing. Now, in addition to these, we intend to focus on retail, auto and textile this year.” The company, which recently acquired retail applications companies Retek and ProfitLogic, plans to introduce these retail solutions in India. Like its chief competitor SAP, Oracle is also eyeing the huge opportunity in the Indian mid-market segment through its recently launched Oracle Application Server Standard Edition one. Elaborating on the changing applications market landscape, Dhawan said that companies that typically chose best-of-breed technologies to meet their business needs now wanted more integration between the various solutions since management and complexity of solutions was becoming an issue. He expects compliance and regulatory mandates like the BASEL II and Sarbanes-Oxley Act to be the key driver for growth in FY 06. Oracle, which completed the PeopleSoft merger last fiscal, clocked revenues of $11.8 billion in FY05 of which the APAC region accounted for 14 percent of the revenues. The company has 6000 database customers and over 400 applications customers in India (including 125+ PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers). In FY05, the company added 70 application customers to its kitty. Apart from targeting the Indian market for business growth, the company continues to bet heavily on the Indian engineering talent. Murali Subramanian, VP-ERP development said that Oracle would take a decision on having a development center for Retek solutions (retail) this year. The company presently has around 6700 employees at its development centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore and plans to increase the employee headcount at both centers. India is slated to play an important role in the company's much-touted “Project Fusion” which involves the development of Oracle's next generation combined application that would supercede the individual features of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Subramanian said that the merged application would be more standards based and would have a better user interface.

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