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Oracle now has more cloud regions than AWS now

Naushad K. Cherrayil

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October 1, 2020

Oracle now has more cloud regions than AWS now

US tech giant has been flexing its muscles in the infrastructure space after winning customers such as Zoom, 8X8, McAfee, 7-Eleven, GE, Sky, Outfront, CERN, Cisco and Nissan.
Public cloud spending is expected to cross $430m this year and $1b by 2024, growing at an annual growth rate of 25% over the five-year period from 2019-2024, IDC says.
Oracle on track to have 36 cloud regions by the end of the year.

Dubai: Oracle opened its 26th cloud region worldwide in Dubai in a bid to up its game in the infrastructure space and stay ahead of Amazon Web Services.

The US technology giant had opened its first datacentre in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi last year and a Saudi facility this year.

The second datacentre in Saudi Arabia is expected to come within a year as part of their “in-country” dual region strategy to help customers address disaster recovery and compliance needs.

The Dubai and Saudi facilities run on Generation 2 cloud infrastructure while the one in Abu Dhabi is Generation 1 and the company plans to upgrade it to Generation 2 soon.

Generation 1 cloud places user code and data on the same computers as the cloud control code with shared CPU, memory, and storage while Generation 2 cloud puts customer code, data, and resources on a bare-metal computer, while cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture.

The US giant is opening one region every 23 days, on an average, over the next 12 months and aims to have 36 cloud regions by the end of 2020 compared to 25 for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Oracle, which is a leader in the applications side, has been flexing its muscles in the infrastructure space after winning customers such as Zoom, 8X8, McAfee, 7-Eleven, GE, Sky, Outfront, CERN, Cisco and Nissan, to name a few.

Supporting economic growth

“Oracle’s second-generation cloud region in Dubai will help accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of organisations across the UAE’ government entities, large enterprise and SMEs, thus directly supporting the country’s economic vision,” said Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice-President for Technology at Oracle MEA & CEE.

**Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice-President for Technology at Oracle MEA & CEE**.

Moreover, he said that organisations in the UAE and wider Middle East have prioritised cloud-led digital transformation to achieve higher growth, drive innovation, reduce costs, and now to even navigate the crisis and thrive during the recovery phase.

“Our planned cloud infrastructure footprint for the region; two cloud regions in the UAE and two in Saudi Arabia are a direct response to the rapid adoption of Oracle Cloud in the region,” he said.

“We will see existing Oracle customers move their workloads on to the cloud and out of that, partly will be hybrid cloud, cloud at customer and dedicated cloud at the region, and new workloads coming on to the cloud,” he added.

Etisalat is the telecom partner for the Oracle cloud region in Dubai.

Regis Louis, Vice-President for Technology Strategy at Oracle EMEA, said Oracle’s cloud journey started 12 years ago with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and moved into the infrastructure and platform as services five years ago.

Addressing the challenges

“Many customers haven’t taken their critical and core business apps and moved them to the public cloud. We tried to understand what were the challenges faced by the customers and by doing so, we found that they [challenges] were enterprise readiness, complexity/risk verses RoI, data sovereignty and lock-ins,” he said.

That is when, he said that Oracle decided to create a brand new infrastructure cloud from scratch with a key focus on engineering to address the challenges and that is Gen 2 Oracle cloud infrastructure.

Hyperscalers are boosting their investments in the region as Covid-19 has given a shot in the arm to digital transformation.

Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice-President and Regional Managing Director for Middle East, Turkey and Africa at International Data Corporation (IDC), said that UAE-based organisations are prioritising digital transformation to navigate the current crisis as well as to compete and thrive during the recovery phase.

“Cloud is increasingly being viewed as the technology platform that can provide the agility, capacity and innovation capability that is required to accelerate digital transformation,” he said.

Moreover, he said that the investments by global cloud providers in in-country datacentres will continue to alleviate concerns of data residency and security among organisations in sectors such as the public sector, banking and others.

Well-positioned to handle broad use cases

According to IDC, GCC public cloud market (IaaS, SaaS and PaaS) is expected to grow from $956 million this year to $2.35 billion in 2024, at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent.

IaaS is expected to grow by about 33 per cent and SaaS by 24 per cent this year.

In the long run, IDC said that IaaS and PaaS are going to grow at a much faster pace as cloud adoption is the new platform for most of the enterprises for cost reduction, agility, efficiency and innovation.

In the UAE, public cloud spending is expected to cross $430 million this year and $1 billion by 2024, growing at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent over the five-year period from 2019-2024.

Gartner in its “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services” report said that Oracle, a niche player, is now well-positioned to handle broad lift-and-shift use cases (not just those limited to Oracle applications) and hybrid workloads, and has a future focus on expanding the worldwide geographies it serves with competitive capabilities.

Gartner said in its recent report that Oracle has demonstrated impressive improvements in both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities of OCI in the past year.

Between 2019 and 2020, Gartner stated that OCI improved from a solution score of 38 out of 100, to 62 out of 100. Its score on the required criteria vital to businesses improved from 45 per cent to 74 per cent.

Oracle to double its IaaS market share

Compared to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, Gartner said that Oracle is the provider whose scores improved the most in 2020.

Consequently, Gartner now recommends that cloud architects consider OCI not only for cloud environments that are anchored by workloads that use Oracle technologies but also for use cases centred on bare-metal servers, high-performance computing needs or high-performance networking needs.

The research firm believes that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, by 2025, will at least double its cloud infrastructure platform services market share from the current three per cent.

Many organisations continue to view Oracle solely as a software company, but OCI is a public cloud solution optimised by design to run Oracle technologies, with capabilities now broad enough to run general-purpose workloads.

Lending ears to customers’ need

What we are trying to solve is the challenges faced by HR teams, He said and delivering a set of functionalities that make the employees feel that they are guided, connected with the company and also make it easier for HR professionals to work remotely and deliver best practices to their employees.

Moreover, she said the new features improve the employee experience, enable career mobility, enhance data accuracy for HR and enable leaders to prioritise the diversity of their workforce.

“We have seen strong growth for HCM since moving to the cloud. Almost 100 per cent of our requirements are sourced from customers. Our customers are very much involved with us and help us to identify the requirements,” she said.

Covid has pushed HR to the forefront in leading the changes in the workforce as they [HR] are the heroes of these times, she said.

Lindner said that customers have not slowdown in their investments and implementations.

For example, he said that DP World had 160 separate ERP systems across 44 countries and getting all consolidated into Oracle ERP under one roof is quite a big achievement.

“Our vision has been always to automate the finance functions as much as possible. McKinsey has said that 89 per cent of the finance functions are highly automatable. Finance leaders are increasingly turning to automation and analytics to improve process efficiency and identify opportunities.

“We already have a very sound offering in the market and some of the investments have been around intelligent process automation and we are leapfrogging in RPA with more of a machine learning-based detection of the processes that can be automated,” he said.

Key technology trends

Speaking on the latest technology trends, Natarajan Radhakrishnan, CIO, Hinduja Global Solutions, said the movement to hybrid cloud, along with three As of digital transformation – automation, artificial intelligence and analytics, is getting more advanced, interconnected and shaping the new workplace environment.

“Today we can even automate sophisticated tasks. Even in analytics, we have advanced from descriptive to predictive and cognitive analysis. We are witnessing an increasing combination of automation and analytics with liberal doses of AI,” he said.

Gupta also emphasised that corporate learning has transformed and today there is more sophistication and maturity in terms of how organisations are thinking about their people development. “Trending skills in professional services in terms of the 4th industrial revolution is where a lot of investment and skill development is happening,” he said.

The Covid-19 impact

Karthikeyan Natarajan, COO, Cyient – a company that provides solutions in engineering, manufacturing, and digital transformation said, the most important transformation Covid-19 has brought about in industries is the ability and agility to launch new products in a short cycle. Companies need to accelerate to meet new consumer expectations and market realities. We will witness technology adoption at varying levels based on different verticals.”

Providing statistics of how Covid-19 has accelerated the progress, he says, during the past six months alone, about 20 per cent new buyers were added to the e-commerce and digital commerce space. The number of e-learning has gone up by 27 per cent, while media and entertainment consumption went up by 18 per cent and e-payments up by 22 per cent.

“What previously took six years has happened during the last six months, putting pressure on enterprises to be digitally ready,” said Natarajan.

UaaS – the new mantra

Meanwhile, the upskilling of employees is emerging as a key HR strategy as more corporates try to catch up with new technology advancements and remain competitive.

The lockdown has provided an opportunity for companies to enable upskilling among its workforce.

“Upskilling-as-a-Service (UaaS) is what we are focusing on,” Simmi Dhamija, CTO, Tech Mahindra, said.

“Digital workplace has helped every organisation and has produced flexible work schedules, saving travel time and the very stress of traffic,” she says. Her company last month launched a new UaaS platform for over 60,000 employees globally in an effort towards skill development and preparing them for the future.

Achieving 100% chatbot automation is still years away: Verloop

Naushad K. Cherrayil

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September 27, 2020

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Achieving 100% chatbot automation is still years away: Verloop

Theoretically, it is doable but technically, the amount of computation needed to do it is huge and costs can run up to millions, Verloop CEO says
GCC is heavy on voice rather than text when compared to India.
Targets 1,000 enterprise customers in the next one and a half years.

Dubai: Chatbots are gaining traction across the world and in many industries but can it achieve 100 per cent automation?

It is not possible in the near future; Gaurav Singh, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Verloop.io, told Tech Channel News.

“Queries can come in many ways which we haven’t predicted and one of the biggest challenges is when the customer gets irritated. The bot is not trained to handle it,” he said.

A chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites and mobile apps or the telephone.

“Theoretically, it is doable but technically, the amount of computation needed to do it is huge. I don’t think people are going to spend millions of dollars on it because you need to merge the cost-benefit ratio and the RoI has to be right for the users to buy.

It is better for businesses to handle the most important queries and leave the rest to the bot,” he said.

However, he said that they have achieved 65 per cent automation in some businesses and in some cases have peaked it to 92 per cent.

The company has handled more than two billion queries so far.

Covid revs up digital adoption

“We want to push the upper limit. We want to improve the coverage in precision and increase the floor of how much automation we are doing and want to understand more languages. There is still a lot of work needs to be done and we are still at an early stage,” Singh said.

The customer support automation startup has seen the demand for its platform spike during Coivid-19 and accelerated the digital adoption which C-level executives had in the pipeline.

Singh said that their revenues have increased threefold in the last six months.

“Deals, which used to take six months to close, are happening in two months. Customer support hasn’t got the due attention from developers and the leadership so far. We are bringing the technology, which the marketing and other functions had, to customer support and enable businesses to delight their customers,” he said.

Gartner predicts that 70 per cent of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning applications, chatbots and mobile messaging by 2022.

According to Markets and Markets, the global conversational AI market size is expected to grow from $4.2 billion in 2019 to $15.7 billion by 2024, at an annual growth rate of 30.2 per cent.

Abu Dhabi is the right place to be

Verloop, which started in 2015 in Bengaluru, moved to Abu Dhabi more than a month ago after getting $5 million “Series A” funding led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) Fund, the venture fund backed by Abu Dhabi’s state holding company ADQ.

The startup had raised $3 million Seed funding in India.

“We had a lot of machine learning and AI to be built into the platform and Abu Dhabi has been fostering that culture a lot with the Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The move has made a lot more important for us as we have a support infrastructure as well and can be close to our customers,” Singh said.

However, he said the idea floated when realising that the next set of one billion people, who come online, will access the internet through voice and when that happens, businesses will not be able to answer it.

“These people expect answers in WhatsApp and languages that are not standardised. Businesses will not be able to do it and if they wanted to, it will take a lot of manpower and the volume of conversations that business get will go up exponentially. So, we started conversational automation,” he said.

Spreading wings

First, Verloop built it as a B2C platform but felt the demand is on the B2B side. Enterprises can deploy the bot on the website, app, Facebook page and WhatsApp number.

Now, it is been used by big banks, insurance, delivery and retail companies in the region.

Singh said that they have more than 5,000 business customers and more than 150 enterprises from GCC, India and South East Asia.

“We are planning to expand into other markets in a phased manner. Our next target is to have 1,000 enterprise customers in the next one and a half years,” he said.

Verloop supports 11 languages, including all dialects of Arabic.

However, he said that the region is heavy on voice recording and sending it on WhatsApp when compared to India but the text has a lot more adoption than voice despite being more monotonous and robotic.

Will telecom operators perform better or worse in second half of 2020?

Naushad K. Cherrayil

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September 26, 2020

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Will telecom operators perform better or worse in second half of 2020?

Despite showing strong resilience in the first half, operators predict a decline in revenues due to an economic downturn.
IDC sees a 1.4% decline in worldwide spending on telecommunication and pay-TV services to $1.55tr in 2020.
MTN Consulting expects second half to be worse than the first half.
IDC expects pre-crisis spending levels unlikely to be reached before 2022.

Dubai: The telecommunications industry is one of the most resilient sectors of the global economy during the Covid-19 crisis and helped them to avoid major losses in the first half of the year.

Considering the steep drop in economic growths experienced by many countries in the first half of 2020, the telco market hasn’t performed that badly.

The operators’ reports clearly showed that increased demand from the consumer segment during the lockdown, government measures aimed at protecting businesses and the general population from the economic impact of the pandemic.

However, telecom operators’ predictions for the rest of the year are generally more pessimistic as they anticipate a decline in revenues due to an economic downturn that would shut down businesses, raise unemployment, freeze tourist activities, and force people to cut spending on nonessential products and services.

According to industry experts, the negative trend will impact all global regions, but not at the same magnitude.

Recovery seen in 2021

As per International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on telecommunication and pay-TV services will reach $1.55 trillion in 2020, a decrease of 1.4 per cent year over year.

Industry experts said that the global spending on telecommunication and pay-TV services will decrease this year and expects the market to start its recovery next year, but pre-crisis spending levels will not be reached before 2022.

MTN Consulting said that the second half of 2020 is increasingly looking like it may be worse than the first.

Despite recent earnings report from Ciena projecting third-quarter revenue of $800-840 million compared to $968 million a year ago, CommScope, Intel, Dycom, and Mastec also all projected a weak second half.

Intel noted a change in seasonality, predicting second half would amount to 47 per cent of the fiscal year 2020 revenues, down from the typical of about 54 per cent.

These vendors are more exposed to the US than the average, and the US has dealt with Covid-19 by not dealing with it, in large part.

But Europe and South America also face risks in the second half, even if just because of the interconnected nature of the global economy.

EMEA to see biggest revenue fall

“Even China could see a tough second half, as the initial 5G buildout surge fades and its local vendors struggle to keep their product pipelines moving amidst supply chain restrictions,” Subramanian Venkatraman, Principal Analyst at MTN Consulting, said.

The biggest revenue fall for the year, according to IDC, will be in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), by 2.1 per cent to $469 billion, followed by Asia/Pacific (including Japan and China) by 1.7 per cent to $472 billion because of the larger number of price-sensitive customers in the low-income countries of Africa and Asia.

In the Americas, revenue is expected to fall by 0.5 per cent to $613 billion.

In the remainder of the five-year forecast, Kresimir Alic, Research Director at IDC, said that EMEA and Asia/Pacific are also expected to recover somewhat more slowly than the Americas because the customers in emerging markets are expected to remain cost-cautious for a longer time.

“As countries around the world continue to struggle with new waves of Covid-19 and scientists are still quite far away from al solution to the problem, telecom operators are now focused on efficiency improvements to mitigate the expected negative impacts during the rest of the year,” he said.

However, he said that with additional cost savings, including lower capital expenditures following restrained investment policies, this can still be translated into operative EBITDA growth.

IIT Madras builds microprocessor for India’s smart cities, working on iClass chip

Mohammed Fahad

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September 24, 2020

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IIT Madras builds microprocessor for India’s smart cities, working on iClass chip

The project was funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, fabrication at an ISRO facility in Chandigarh and motherboard manufactured in Bengaluru.

Bengaluru: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has developed an indigenously-made microprocessor with an aim to power up the growing need for IoT devices in the country.

“The experiment was undertaken to mainly demonstrate our ability to develop an ecosystem. We aimed to clock between 70 to 100MHz and I am happy to say that we achieved 100MHz,” said Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Group, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.

Called MOUSHIK, the processor cum ‘system on chip’ was conceptualised, designed and developed at the Pratap Subrahmanyam Centre for Digital Intelligence and Secure Hardware Architecture (PS-CDISHA) of the RISE Group, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.

“The processor we have developed is an open-source one and can be further developed and customised based on domain-specific architecture,” said Prof. Veezhinathan.

The Indian government last month launched “Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge” in an effort to achieve self-reliance in technology. As part of the initiative, IIT Madras and Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) developed the two microprocessors named Shakti (32 bit) and Vega (64 bit) respectively using Open Source Architecture under the aegis of Microprocessor Development Programme of the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY).

Drawing the attention

The MOUSHIK project was funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

The design of the microprocessor, motherboard printed circuit board design, assembly and post-silicon boot-up were done at IIT Madras.

The foundry-specific backend design and fabrication were undertaken at the Semi-Conductor Laboratory of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Chandigarh and the manufacturing of this motherboard was done at Bengaluru.

The first indigenous chip in the SHAKTI series was designed and booted up in October 2018. “Shakthi MOUSHIK SOC will constitute the heart of an indigenously-developed motherboard called ‘Ardonyx 1.0,” he said.

As per the latest research, the number of IoT devices is expected to grow to 24.1 billion and in terms of revenue rise to $1.5 trillion by 2030.

$1 microporcessor

“We are doing it at the right time. In India alone, we are looking at massive digital transformation with millions of devices being deployed at multiple sectors. We need to be ready for the deployment,” he said, adding that with optimum numbers, it should cost less than $1 to produce each microprocessor.

According to him, the department is also working on indigenously developing the more advanced iClass chip, which it expects to be ready by June 2021 – delayed by about six months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The super-scale processor will be the basic building blocks for mobile phones and supercomputers. We are also working on enhancing the processors with advanced security features, ability to execute AI and ML programs and edge intelligence,” he added.

Supporting economic growth

Addressing the challenges

Well-positioned to handle broad use cases

Oracle to double its IaaS market share

Related posts:

No slowdown in investment strategies

Lending ears to customers’ need

Related posts:

Key technology trends

The Covid-19 impact

UaaS – the new mantra

Covid revs up digital adoption

Abu Dhabi is the right place to be

Spreading wings

Recovery seen in 2021

EMEA to see biggest revenue fall

Drawing the attention

$1 microporcessor

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