SL key market for Oracle in Asia
Sri Lanka is a key emerging market for Oracle in the Asian region, along with Bangladesh and Pakistan, and some ASEAN countries, according to the IT Company’s Sales Director for SaaS – ASEAN Applications Business Akkasha Sultan Shaikh. Further, the local office of Oracle has been tasked with bringing in next generation platforms and more sophisticated applications into Sri Lanka, along with training partners to adhere to global best practices as well as giving them the benefit of regional experience.
Further, he – in a recent interview with the Business Times in Colombo – also added “Sri Lanka is one of the markets where Oracle is leading the show in terms of introducing cloud applications”. Additionally, he noted that Oracle is “number one in many industries worldwide and the same goes for Sri Lanka, we have done a lot of work with telecoms, financial sector, insurance, retailers, manufacturers, distribution, etc.”. He also commented; “Based on our experience with Sri Lanka, we have mapped a plan to go forward where we first grow the market and then grow Oracle here”.
Continuing, he indicated that the plan for Sri Lanka also included Oracle expanding its local business across multiple industries, but SMEs were the focus for the cloud. “With cloud coming in, we found that this is more conducive to SMEs because they are interested in products that are less costly and more subscription based, so this is the market we will be focusing on quite a lot to introduce cloud applications locally”, said Mr. Shaikh.
Mr. Shaikh also elaborated on investments, mainly training, carried out by Oracle in Sri Lanka, signalling that the company had trained local partners on international best practices while also giving them regional exposure. He also added that, via Oracle University programmes, Sri Lankans were also made aware of how to reduce costs, how to get on the cloud and how to be more agile, so they do not have to wait six or 12 months to go up and live on a process. Instead, going live in a much shorter time span.
Commenting further, Mr. Shaikh added; “Our approach is very simple, our approach is to give our customers an end-to-end solution for their business requirements and then take them to the next level where they can streamline all their functions so that they don’t have to go out into the market and buying siloed products, or siloed cloud, and then try and worry about building rules and regulations… The beauty of Sri Lanka is that local customers understand the need to adopt global best practices, and are willing to use the products in a vanilla fashion, changing their own processes via business re-engineering to better reflect global best practices”.