Oracle launches GST-compliant ERP Cloud in India; unveils India datacenter plans

Oracle said it will expand its cloud services in India over the next six to nine months with plans for an Oracle data center in India.

Over the coming months Oracle will be reviewing proposals from government and business partners to provide customers with the capability to build and move workloads to an India-based cloud. The services will offer uncompromised security and performance at a significant price advantage over both existing on-premises infrastructure and competitive cloud offerings.

“Our customers and partners in India have trusted their businesses and mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud for years,” said Thomas Kurian, president of product development, Oracle. “With this expansion we will be able to further support customer choice adding to capabilities already available through deployments of Oracle Cloud at Customer, as well as other Oracle Cloud data center regions in Asia Pacific.”

Oracle has also announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud in India to help local and multinational firms operating in India prepare for the country’s transformational tax reforms i.e. GST.

Speaking at the Oracle OpenWorld in New Delhi, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, "With ERP cloud, you can streamline your enterprise business processes, procurement, project portfolio management and more and you can increase productivity, lower costs and improve controls."

“Global adoption of our leading Oracle ERP Cloud continues to accelerate. We expect this trend to grow in India as customers can now take advantage of Oracle ERP Cloud’s comprehensive tax management capabilities, fully integrated with core ERP functions, to help make better business decisions and address regulatory changes driven by the new GST,” added Catz.

GST regulations will be implemented from July 1 this year that will lead to simplified and uniform tax rates across all states. The new regulations are expected to boost economic activity and contribute substantially to GDP growth via a reduction in friction in the movement of goods and services across state borders.

Oracle ERP Cloud delivers built-in features to facilitate compliance with new Goods and Services Tax (GST) regulations, provides native support for GST Network integration and reporting, and support for local requirements including withholding, payment processing, and statutory reporting, the company said in a statement.

"Customers can now take advantage of Oracle ERP Cloud’s comprehensive tax management capabilities, fully integrated with core ERP functions, to help make better business decisions and address regulatory changes driven by the new GST,” said Catz.

Emphasising on the digital transformation of India by leveraging the mobile phone technology, Katz noted that the use of smartphones by Indian youth was a gateway to the digital economy. She also stressed that government and businesses should move to Cloud as it would allow them benefit from economy, deploy resources faster and at low cost, and allow them deploy previous resources back in business scene.