Dubai: Oracle is seeing a fast adoption of its SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions in the Middle East, particularly human capital management (HCM) in the cloud.

Oracle now offers a complete suite of SaaS applications and platform services available on the cloud with the addition of supply chain management (SCM).

Alian Ozan, technology vice-president for Eastern Central Europe, Middle East and Africa at Oracle, said that customers can seamlessly move their SaaS applications between public and private cloud.

Oracle’s SaaS applications are built on open standards so that it can run on any open standards platform.

The US company has 1,300 ERP (Enterprise resource planning) customers, 592 applications, 5,000 Human Capital Management customers (of which 1,000 are core HCM) and around 5,000 CRM customers globally.

“Public cloud gives an opportunity for companies in the region not to invest heavily on complex solutions — hardware and software — on premises,” Ozan said.

At the same time, he said that the companies are not going to move everything to the cloud, it is bits and pieces.

The company launched infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) solutions recently but intends to compete on all three layers of the cloud — applications, platforms, and infrastructure — to lure enterprises to migrate or build core applications on its platform by making it cheaper than other cloud providers.

“We see great intake for talent management services, ERP on the cloud, performance management services in the region. The intake of cloud services in the region is same as in Western Europe,” Ozan said.

Moving data

Oracle, which has 19 data centres globally, has no data centres in the region.

On whether companies are willing to move its data outside the region, Ozan said that some industries do not have a problem in storing the data outside the region.

“ERP in the cloud is an excellent fit for the Middle East. Globalisation and compliance for financial and business processes are important for business and government in Gulf. Cloud ERP supports both these needs, as customisation and enhancements can be done more easily with the tools available,” he said.

Security has been an issue when moving the data from the premises to the cloud. Regarding this, he said that Oracle has the M7 chip.

“We are puttying the security on a chip level and not on the software level. People are capable of hacking the software and so we decided it on the hardware level. Hacking the M7 chip is practically impossible,” he said.

He said that Oracle is encrypting the data stored on the server for security reasons. To decrypt it, a customer needs an electronic key and that is with the customers. Nobody at Oracle can read “customers’ data” in the cloud.