Vivek brings more than 24+ years of General Management, sales & channel leadership experience with proven track record of successfully building business.

The last few years have, in a lot of ways, substantiated the power of technology and solidified its position as the chief change maker. With this, the gap between a ‘tech first’ organization and a ‘traditional’ one has been further expanded causing the creation of two very distinct ways of doing business. While the former thrived in the evolving business landscape, the latter witnessed great difficulties in ensuring primary business requirements such as continuity. Setting an example of what technology can do, many organizations are much ahead in the competitive landscape and are able to offer enhanced customer experience with cloud, big data analytics, AI, ML, chatbots, blockchain amongst many other key technologies. To gain resilience, improve innovation and ensure efficiency, the organizations that were on fence about technology are now quickly turning to Indian Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) for modernization. With their rising relevance, Indian ISVs have now become one of the primary enablers of a tech first culture in the country. Having simplified SaaS solutions, ISVs with niche sector specific expertise are allowing enterprises to enhance on their digitization agenda. However, for ISVs to continually assist this transformation efficiently, they too require accepting an exceptional and strategic way of technological advancement, automation and innovation for themselves too.

Pivoting to Cloud to Attain Momentum
Considering the importance of ISVs in the country with rapid acceptance of cloud and also the impact that Indian ISVs are causing globally, it is important that they ensure a steady pace of innovation to match the market demand. As one data point, Gartner estimated that total end-user spending on public cloud services worldwide is expected to hit nearly $600 billion 2023. As cloud acceptance grows, the Indian SaaS landscape will also mature and therefore ISVs need to align their offerings accordingly to ensure competitive advantage.In my various conversations with many ISVs, I have learnt that being a high growth segment they prioritize gaining business value, ensuring security and resilience over anything else. They are also realizing that moving to SaaS based offerings is an imperative to achieve speed, security as well as efficiency. As ISVs catalyze the digital transformation of many customers, they are required to attain all of this and more which can only be achieved with cloud.

"It is necessary to understand that it is not just about moving to cloud but also about choosing the right cloud provider"

Picking the Right Cloud Provider
It is necessary to understand that it is not just about moving to cloud but also about choosing the right cloud provider. Considering ISVs are usually sector specific, they essentially require a cloud that can be relied on at times of peak demand, across geographies and even during changing business environments. As ISVs transform their applications to SaaS applications, they must also choose a cloud provider that helps them achieve better access to newer customer segments with lower customer acquisition cost, better efficiency and also reduce TCO by reducing time to market. All of this, also in many ways will allow them to improve on customer retention, satisfaction and ensuring they have better overall services. Additionally, ISVs must also highly consider their need for scalability when wanting to pick a cloud. With cloud, ISVs should be able to achieve automation by reducing various steps across development, testing and deployment. With the right cloud provider’s automation capabilities and also many DevOps tools, they can achieve the quality they seek.

Another benefit with SaaS solutions is that it can lead to much faster deployment which in turn leads to competitive pricing. However, pricing is one concern which can only be addressed with a responsible cloud provider. In my conversation with an ISV catering to OTT space, it was clear that they have a large volume of outbound data to manage and thus they worry about it. The cost of leveraging a cloud provider can be highly unreasonable for them given many times cloud comes with various hidden costs. For such ISVs, I highly recommend relying on a cloud provider that understands the need of cost effective digitization.

Therefore, at Oracle too, we had long recognized the need of surrounding our offering with complete cloud economics. Having a customer centric approach, we are very diligent in our offerings and ensuring that ISVs have an efficient path towards innovation. With this understanding OCI offers autonomous services which gives higher performance, costs less and offers much better productivity. It is also important to simplify cost structures, remove any hidden costs and also never add any hard to estimate costs and our cost models reflect the same for customers across sectors. We also offer the ability to migrate or build applications with minimal re-architecture which can be extremely critical for ISVs. Oracle Lift Services is another very well leveraged program which has allowed customers to get free expert guidance from various cloud engineers. We also offer Oracle Support Rewards which allows customers to reduce their software support costs.

As a massive move towards technology has become omnipresent, SaaS based services are now an imperative instead of an option. ISVs, in their journey of supporting country wide digitization, must also be supported in the right manner by cloud providers with low costs, efficiency and ease of migration. ISVs too must choose the right cloud providers with a customer centric approach.