80% of Oracle’s new capabilities sourced from customer feedback, says group VP Rajan Krishnan

Organisations worldwide, including those in India, are progressively embracing cloud technology, relying more on modern applications to enhance various facets of their business. This extends from finance and human resources to customer experience, offering consistent processes across crucial business functions. For tech giant Oracle, these applications span enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, human capital management, and customer experience. In an exclusive conversation with Business Today, Rajan Krishnan, Group vice president, Applications Development, Oracle, talks about the increasing adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in India, the role of Generative AI in these apps, and how Oracle drives innovation. Edited excerpts:

Q. Can you provide an overview of Oracle’s SaaS offerings and how they contribute to the company’s overall strategy?

A. The way we approach SaaS is, first of all fundamentally different from how our competitors are approaching SaaS. I say that because if you look at the intersection of SaaS applications, whether it's ERP (enterprise resource planning), supply chain management,  people process (HR & human capital management), customer experience (CX), the completeness delivered by a single company just within the SaaS portfolio, we are unique compared with what’s available out there in the market.

We are also unique because we are the only SaaS company that is also a full-fledged platform company and an infrastructure company. The platform and infrastructure company, our competitors there, don’t necessarily play in the SaaS area. And our SaaS competitors don’t necessarily play in the infrastructure area. So we are uniquely positioned and that’s to not only our advantage but more importantly to the advantage of our customers because we are to first deliver innovation at a much faster pace. We’re able to deliver a robust architecture that positions our customers to adapt to change better. Four years ago, it was the pandemic and everyone was going digital. Then today we are talking Gen AI. In the middle along came blockchain and IoT. The business environment keeps changing. But if you have a robust enough infrastructure and architecture, we have a better place to serve our customers. So we're unique in that sense. Our industry applications are also built on the same infrastructure. So that’s the backbone of our SaaS and Cloud strategy, which also underpins our growth strategy. 

Q. What are the key factors driving the adoption of Oracle SaaS apps among businesses globally? Where do you see the uptake coming from in India?

A. Broadly speaking, there are some verticals that are driving growth more than others, but we have about 14,000-plus customers across every major vertical, like banking, financial services, telecom, healthcare, public sector and government retail, gaming, and so on. We have customers in each of these areas, in a number of geographies as well. If you were to talk about the big ones - easily banking, finance, healthcare and manufacturing.

Here in the Indian market, Apollo is a big customer for us and Apollo Lifestyle more recently standardising on Oracle ERP separate from Apollo hospitals themselves. The Omega Healthcare, Fortis, we have a whole slew of healthcare customers here in India. Similarly, with financial services, we have some of the biggest banks that run Fusion Applications for their HR processes, whether it's ICICI or HDFC. Also, in the case of manufacturing more recently, one of the companies that went live is myTVS. This is an aftermarket play that trains resources at the local grassroots village level to service aftermarket vehicles from TVS. To answer your question, the drive is globally from banking, healthcare and also manufacturing standpoint. In fact, the examples I just gave you, coincidentally, banking healthcare and manufacturing are driving here in India as well. 

Q. In the dynamic landscape of AI, Generative AI is gaining momentum. How do you see its relevance in enhancing the applications ecosystem?

A. It has, and I say that in past tense, because we’re not looking at Gen AI that’s going to come and touch our applications in 2026. We introduced Gen AI last year in 2023 and our capabilities are very much in the context of enterprise business processes. Gen AI at large is fine is very powerful. Everybody knows OpenAI and ChatGPT but there’s only so much you could do with the context of business processes because it has to understand private proprietary information. It’s not just digesting something from the internet and giving you results. So, our strategy there is to combine what’s available at the universe at large on the large language models (LLMs) for digesting vast amounts of data, and combine that with your in-house business systems information that is proprietary to you as a customer. Combine the two to create meaningful updates inside these SaaS applications in the context of business processes like HR or customer experience or supply chain.

Let me give you a more tangible example. Let’s say you are a recruitment manager, your recruiter you need to create a job post. Well, you can create that and ChatGPT and then what? Whether that job posting was effective or not how can you do the analysis you won’t be able to do because it’s not inside your enterprise? But if you use our GenAI capabilities, it's inside the HR application. You give it some bullet points it creates a beautiful job description for you. Then it posts that and it compares the results and see which ones actually attract the most talented candidates. So that's an example of Gen AI inside of HR. 

Or if you’re a customer service agent, you’re on the phone with a customer dealing with a customer problem. You need to understand who the customer is quickly get to the problem from knowledge articles inside the company and service the customer better. And after that summarise the call instantly. We’re not talking even you know five seconds after that. It’s in real-time. You call the AI functionality inside the customer service; it captures the entire call for you and is recorded inside the system.

These are all available; we introduced that in the last few months. And we’re going to introduce several use cases on more of a go-forward basis this year. So, Gen AI is not the future but it's already picked up in the applications in the context of those processes that I talked about – HR, supply chain and finance. 

Q. What will the Gen AI SaaS apps of 2026 look like? 

A. We’ve introduced about 50 or so processes or use cases with Gen AI built into the product. So, like I mentioned earlier, we have about 14,000 customers.  The way we build future capabilities, it’s an iterative model. These 14,000 customers are already, in their environment have Gen AI capabilities that we introduced. It's an iterative process based on how they use it and what they want for the future. They provide feedback all through the same system. The platform is called Oracle Cloud Customer Connect. 80% of new capabilities are sourced from customers and customers giving ideas about where they want to take the product. 

What that will look like in 2026, I don't know. But we are they have a robust exchange mechanism for that information to drive that future product direction. If you'd asked me same time last year, what are the 50 use cases that are coming out between 2023 and 2024. No idea. But here we are. So it's an iterative. 

Q. What are the key trends that you forsee will shape 2024 when it comes to SaaS apps? 

A. First of all, the completeness of the portfolio for ERP, supply chain, HCM and CX. Operating from a position of strength, it's complete in each of these areas already. Now we are reimagining, for example, ERP itself. As opposed to end-to-end business processes within just one company, we're looking at ERP as a business system, an operating system for the whole ecosystem. So, if you're a company that's using our ERP, if you're a manufacturer, and you rely on a bank for financing, you rely on a distribution company for distributing the product and guess what the bank and the distribution company and the manufacturer all being on the same ERP facilitates transactions beyond your enterprise. What leaves the manufacturer goes to the bank and the bank goes back to the manufacturer, and the process continues.  It doesn't just end within the four walls of the company to be reimagining that and delivering this capability called B2B that serves as a system for the whole ecosystem for the continuum of the business process itself. 

Virtual cards are another trend that we’re seeing. Hence, the partnership with Mastercard and HSBC. For HSBC, it’s a great digital top-line growth opportunity because they can introduce the card feature inside me, as a manufacturer, into my enterprise within the application. I can use that card for corporate purchases or supplier invoice payments, everything. So, the efficiency of this whole process within the ecosystem goes up. Transactional costs come down and productivity goes up. 

We are reimagining the same thing with HCM, you can apply for jobs from say Indeed or from LinkedIn, and that directly goes into our HR applications for recruitment.  That's coming in the future as well.

So we are reimagining it beyond just the enterprise to be more inclusive of the ecosystem for improved efficiency and lower transaction costs.