Indian businesses give Oracle Autonomous Database a big thumbs up

In the digital economy, the concept of an ‘autonomous enterprise’, where businesses become self-driving, is closer to reality than you can imagine! As organizations race against time to transform into data-driven businesses, the management of data can be an enormous challenge if you don’t have the necessary IT firepower. Which is why Oracle’s Autonomous Database, touted to be the world’s first and only ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing database’, is gaining fast traction with Indian businesses, according to Sunil Mehra, VP-Cloud Platform, Oracle India.

What business need does your autonomous database cater to?

With data emerging as the most critical corporate asset, our customers are increasingly looking to extract more value from their data faster; but at the same time, they are under pressure to lower costs and ensure data security. In the past, creating a database management system required database practitioners to custom build and manually sustain a complex software as well as hardware stack. Organizations that wanted to better manage their data were compelled to both architect as well as maintain their databases.

The Oracle Autonomous Database is a generational leap of technology innovation in any platform technology of the day. It’s the most successful new product introduction in our company’s 40 year history. Powered by advanced machine learning (ML), the Oracle Autonomous Database offers you a fully self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capability - as a cloud service, empowering you with elasticity and cloud economies of scale.

What does this mean to customers?

Take the financial services industry for instance - using our autonomous database, financial services firms can now be better able to simplify payment processes, reduce lending costs, detect unusual behavior and respond to threats faster - all while adhering to regulatory procedures. Likewise, this can be a game changer in industries such as healthcare, retail and the like.

With the Oracle Autonomous Database cloud service, customers are thrilled to become just users who can fast-track innovation. Because they can easily create new databases in no time, and also convert their existing databases with ease. With database and infrastructure operations completely automated, you can cut down on the administrative costs and empower DBAs to focus more on higher value tasks by extracting more value from the data. With the latest security updates applied automatically, you can eliminate cyber-attack vulnerabilities and ensure there’s no downtime, while also ensuring data privacy. Essentially, you get Autonomous Database Protection from all types of failures spanning regional outages, system failures, and user errors. What’s more, you get all of this with 99.995% availability - this translates to less than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month, including maintenance! In short, customers are very happy with the Oracle Autonomous Database because of its ease of use and performance, as well as the agility it provides.

What’s the initial feedback from customers looking like? What features are they excited about?

Like I mentioned earlier, customers are making the most of what this new category of cloud innovation can offer; because now, you have the ability to get going with an enterprise-grade database in minutes! This significantly reduces the turnaround time of new projects, enabling businesses to further expand their innovation horizon and push out new applications or features faster to market.

Given 72% of IT budgets are used up on routine maintenance tasks, the autonomous patching and backup capability greatly reduces this burden, empowering customers to focus more strengthening their business competencies instead of getting caught up with just ‘managing’ IT.

Integrated, advanced ML algorithms used in our autonomous database are also gaining a lot of appreciation owing to the seamless support, enabling customers to take advantage of real-time predictive analytics which can help them further improve their business.

Another key aspect is the ability to automatically adapt to varying workloads by creating indexes to optimize performance. This brings down the need to have performance engineers on call for every system.

Can you share a few examples of how Indian customers are benefiting from your autonomous database?

We’re seeing a number of Indian businesses - from large enterprises to mid-size businesses to startups; across industries - realizing enormous business value from their data by using our autonomous database. Aided by deeper, more actionable intelligence, these customers have been able to dramatically improve and fast-track business decisions, introduce new products/services to market faster as well as create a smarter workforce. Powered by the autonomous functionality, most early adopters have started realizing business benefits almost instantly - be it more accurate sales projections, faster transaction processing and enhanced customer experiences. They’ve also been able to strengthen their organization’s security fabric to help intuitively preempt cyber-attacks and data breaches.

Federal Bank, a leading mid-size bank with origins in South India, performed ATM analytics using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics Cloud. In less than four weeks, the bank was able to create an intuitive, user-friendly solution that empowered their senior leaders with actionable insights for faster, better decision making.

Codeinks, a Bengaluru based ecommerce software product startup, used Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse out of the box for analyzing heavy-duty ecommerce analytics workloads, and immediately realized an average performance improvement time of 30-50% for their defined scenarios.

What new features/capabilities can we expect from your autonomous database in future?

The number of workloads is burgeoning, and we’re seeing autonomous workload optimization resonating very well with business requirements. Think of it akin to a performance engineer, who can monitor your system 24x7, all 365 days in a year. We’ve also received requests from customers to work towards expanding the ability of optimizing the workloads to mechanize partitioning of datasets as well as create additional summaries like materialized views.