The partnership with Airtel Nxtra will help Oracle, which runs a cloud region in Mumbai and another in Hyderabad, expand the capacity of its India West region, said Garrett Ilg, president of Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific. “When we bring a company like Airtel into the conversation they have these relationships with customers…and that will help us get to that customer base way faster, with way more trust and most importantly with way less risk.”
Ilg did not disclose financial terms of the Oracle-Airtel collaboration.
For Oracle, the tie-up marks the opportunity to sell cloud services to Airtel’s more than a million India enterprise customers. It’s also a chance to tap tens of millions of small businesses looking to use digital services in a market where public cloud spending is expected to exceed $12 billion by 2025, according to tech researcher Gartner.
The arrangement also boosts Airtel’s data centre expansion drive, for which it has committed to invest more than $673 million, helping the company add new revenue streams and lure enterprise clients who typically offer higher margins.
Airtel competes with billionaire tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., which forged an alliance with Microsoft Corp. in 2019 to build data centres across India. This year Jio partnered with Google to boost its enterprise and consumer offerings as it plans to launch 5G services.
Ilg said Oracle was going to hire thousands of employees annually over the next few years, highlighting the Austin, Texas-headquartered company’s focus on India. Separately, Oracle also said it was opening a cloud region in Singapore which will help it offer enterprise cloud services in Southeast Asia, another key market for the US company. Oracle will also invest as much as $30,000 in the city state’s startups to help them enhance their cloud capabilities.
