A firm grip on the e-nablement domain, a focus on software developers, and an eye on future markets like call-centres-Oracle's success-code is ready to run.

By Venkatesha  Basu

An 11-storey car park-that's the kind of sentence fragment that can stop you in your tracks. Surely, something is afoot if this is one of the highlights of the development centre being built by the Indian arm of Oracle at Bangalore- suburb Bannerghatta.

For those whose knowledge of oracles is restricted to the one at Delphi, Oracle built its success around relational databases-huge warehouses of information that companies could mine-and later piggy-backed on the most-used vowel in the language to become a company that creates some of e-biz's most crucial building blocks. Predictably, e-biz is what Shekhar Dasgupta, the CEO of Oracle India (December 1999 sales: Rs 140 crore; year 2000 projections: Rs 195 crore), is betting on to sustain the 40 per cent growth the company has managed to clock. Says he: ''Globally, nine of the 10 largest e-commerce sites, like Amazon and eBay use an Oracle platform. Once e-commerce takes off, we believe Oracle India will have a very important role to play.''

Oracle India's focus on database software, application servers (these drive on-line transactions), and a suite of software development tools (the latest labelled 9i) could help the company leverage the growing e-biz enablement market in India. In layspeak, the increase in the number of data-centres and server farms-required to store the huge amount of data companies doing business online need, and host websites respectively-will up demand for the company's databases and application servers.

Oracle isn't the only company trying to address this market. But it certainly is the only one providing an entire product-suite: its competitors like i2 Technologies (a supply-chain specialist) and Siebel (which focuses on customer management), target niches. A company that chooses to buy best-of-breed software from specialists will have to hire a team of consultants to integrate them into a meaningful whole. Explains Steve Illingworth, Senior Director, Oracle Corporation: ''Speed to market and enhanced efficiency will make buyers opt for a single suite.''

Not everyone agrees with that. Says an executive who works for one of Oracle's focused rivals: ''Customers prefer best-of-breed solutions. And platform-stability is one issue that Oracle hasn't addressed.'' Still, Oracle's approach to distribution does give it an edge. Rather than sell its product directly, it has forged relationships with leading system integrators like Wipro, Digital, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and TCS.

A focus on the software-developer community is part of the growth-recipe Oracle India is brewing. That shouldn't come as a surprise: around 5 per cent (64,000) of the 1.2 million registered software developers who use Oracle's development tools is based in India.

Ask Dasgupta about the other ingredients of Oracle's growth brew and he reels off a slew of initiatives: increasing manpower from 700 to 1,000 in the next 12 months; investing $15 million (Rs 70.31 crore) over the next year; exploring opportunities to offer call-centre solutions in India to tap the booming market; and launching its databases in 15 more Indian languages (they're already available in Hindi and Tamil). An impressive list that, and it's in Oracle India's ability to pull these off that the answer to that original question about the 11-storey car park lies. Did the company scale up too soon?

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