Q] You have just launched a host of offerings and innovations for Indian businesses and Indian advertisers? Tell us a little more about it?
It has almost become a cliché to say that we are living in rapidly changing times. Changes that used to happen over years are happening over weeks. In my career, I have not seen the changes of this scale happening so fast.
In order to help our customers seize the opportunity to own these changes, we have announced a series of updates in our Oracle Cloud Customer Experience and Oracle Cloud CX Marketing. For e.g.
New account-based marketing capabilities to further improving segmentation and targeting at a time when budgets are under the microscope; New Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Team integrations; to help improve the efficiency of content marketing programs, we have introduced pre-configured and reusable content blocks,
Eloqua’s close integration with CX Content also makes sharing content across teams a breeze; also our new personalization capabilities aided by new intelligence capabilities for Responsys will help our customers to simplify marketing production while optimizing for customers.
An intelligent audience selector can help them to find more customers who will respond well to their marketing automations. In addition, we have new Loyalty and Engagement capabilities, new Customer Intelligence Platform enhancements and new capabilities added on the AI, ML and recommendations front.
Our industry leading B2C and B2B platforms now have some cutting edge Advance Intelligence baked in, intelligence such as recommendation, best channel selection or best time to reach the customers for maximum conversion is all machine and AI driven.
Q] What are the ‘nice-to-haves’ to ‘must-haves’ that have emerged in the world of marketing that Oracle is helping its clients with today?
Oracle has been a steadfast supporter for its customers and especially in the dire times that we are in. We are helping our customers to navigate through these delicate times by providing them with counsel and with cutting edge state-of-the-art technology.
Just to explain it further with an example, Myntra, an Indian fashion e-commerce company, leverages Oracle Cloud CX to orchestrate workflows between customer service agents and its nearly 20 million active monthly customer users. This enables the fashion e-tailer to have a systematic and streamlined approach to deliver an end-to-end customer experience.
Furthermore, in the wake of the country’s lockdown, Myntra uses existing data in different ways to help it deliver personalized content to customers based on their browsing history and shopping preferences – taking customer engagement to greater heights.
We are also talking to some banks and automobile companies in India on how to equip the sales teams to manage low-touch, no-touch engagement effectively, on how can documents be collected, applications submitted, verifications done and test drives arranged with little to no human interventions.
Q] Oracle has always bet big on its cloud technology and you have recently announced your second cloud region in Hyderabad. What kind of future do you see here in India?
With two Oracle Cloud regions live in India - first one in Mumbai and the second one in Hyderabad - we are fully geared to support our 15,000 plus customers in the country, in their innovation journey.
Customers are now better able to adhere to the regulatory requirements around data sovereignty and data residency. We are already witnessing rising demand from across sectors for our second-generation cloud and we are quite confident that more cloud adoption will help our partner’s business.
It will also help partners enhance their services capabilities as well. Just to highlight, many of our CX applications are already live in India Data Centre so we have already done investments and are in a position to go to banks, insurance, healthcare, public sector and government enterprises with more confidence because we comply with their regulatory requirements.
We don’t just have infrastructure as a service or platform as a service but also Software as a service across Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Recourse Planning, Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management and Oracle Cloud CX applications in India.
While platform availability and in-country data centre presence is an important and hygiene step to cater to our customers in regulated industries, scale is another aspect I would like to highlight. By virtue of running these applications on our own data centre and our stack, the applications are massively scalable.
Q] Would you say you are in a better position now to take on rivals like Microsoft and Amazon here in India?
Our customers want us to provide unprecedented scale, performance, and reliability, and we stand out on this aspect. The last two holiday seasons in the US have gone without any incidence.
We now have more customers than before who are sending more than a billion marketing communications a month. We have customers who are sending 100M marketing communications in a matter of an hour or two. We see similar volumes during holiday season in India. This scale equation truly sets us apart.
Q] What kind of growth will cloud advertising see in India in 2020? And which are the other areas where Oracle is hoping to expand its presence in India?
The situation is still fluid, and nobody knows how it will evolve. The traditional avenues of advertising do not work any longer, there are new avenues like OTT and other digital platforms.
According to a recent report, the global cloud services market was valued at $264.8 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $927.51 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 16.4% from 2020 to 2027.
Cloud services allow companies to easily promote their products and services on the internet due to which cloud advertising service has the highest market share. I was reading a recent report published by IAMAI and Nielsen named Digital Advertising in India report 2019.
While markets like the United States and China have seen a 19% and 15% growth respectively, India supersedes both these markets as digital ad spends are estimated to grow by 25% over 2018. The report also stated that Digital has only 21% share of the total ad spends, so there is definitely a huge headroom for growth.
At Oracle we take pride in saying that our platforms, by virtue of running completely on Oracle stack and Oracle data centres, are massively scalable and reliable – something which is a key concern for India based marketers and advertisers. The volumes and scale I see in India are unmatched and we are well positioned to handle them.
The new innovations by Oracle
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Capabilities
• Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Team Integrations
• Content Management Capabilities
• Personalization Capabilities
• Loyalty and Engagement Capabilities
• Customer Intelligence Platform Enhancements
