By Nishant Arora
San Francisco, Oct 29 (IANS): Heralding a new era in the cloud business with data security taking centrestage and the launch of several next-generation technological advancements - amid a renewed focus on India, global software and cloud major Oracle has taken on its closest rivals in an aggressive and big way.

Utilising its annual five-day OpenWorld platform to send the right message across this week, the big announcement came when Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, responding to an IANS question, said that he is committed to expanding Oracle's reach in the growing cloud and software markets in India.

The statement is significant at a time when the India software revenue totaled $4 billion in 2014 - an 8.3 percent increase from 2013 revenue of $3.7 billion, according to a latest Gartner report.

Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations, the India software market experienced the highest growth rate in 2014.

"We are seriously working on the expansion plans in India. It is really a good time for this," Hurd told IANS, adding that Loic Le Guisquet, Oracle's president for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region and Asia Pacific, has already initiated the expansion plan.

Later, giving a fillip to Hurd's commitment to expand its base amid a positive mood in India, Thomas Kurian, president of product for Oracle, announced that the leading cloud services provider fully supports the latest digital initiatives launched by the Indian government.

"Oracle is committed towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious 'Digital India' initiative. In the days to come, the world will see Oracle investing in more Indian cities to open new product development centres," Kurian told IANS.

The announcement came at a time when Oracle's closest rivals Microsoft and Amazon have firmed up their plans to set up data centres in India.

Making an aggressive push for its diversified software solutions and integrated cloud platforms, Oracle launched a slew of innovative moves to take on its main cloud computing rivals Amazon and Microsoft.

In a yet another remarkable speech, Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison announced two cloud platforms with a great emphasis on maintaining security at a time when private data is at the risk of being stolen via cyber attacks.

While the new "Oracle SCM Cloud" will offer the first complete supply chain and discrete manufacturing with 100 percent fusion, the "E-commerce in the CX Cloud" platform will be a complete, integrated modern suite covering the customers' requirements across the spectrum like marketing, sales, service and social responsibility.

Ellison also announced a new mobile, consumer-like Cloud UI - a state of the art java-based mobile user interface.

He also launched the "Exadata Cloud Service" that will facilitate identical software and hardware on-premise.

But the best was yet to come. Giving hackers a real nightmare, Oracle launched the world's first silicon-based microprocessor that has taken data security to an entirely new level.

The revolutionary 32-core, 256-thread SPARC M7 chip features an always-on security, the first-ever memory intrusion detection and a high-speed data encryption.

"The security is always on with the first-ever hardware-based memory intrusion detection. It detects cyber threats real-time and shut and eliminate bugs," Ellison announced.

"Our engineers can't read the customers' data in the cloud. Only your people can read the data in the cloud. So you control your data, we don't," he said.

Two new standalone servers, SPARC T7 and SPARC M7, provide entry points that take advantage of the new processor's unique embedded performance and security functions.

The launch of the ultra-secured chip has made the Indian companies flooding the Oracle India executives with queries about its availability and delivery to their doorsteps.

"Since the announcement at OpenWorld 2015, we have been receiving an immense response from the Indian customers and retailers. We will soon start shipping M7 microprocessor to those who will place the orders," Amit Malhotra, head (systems LoB), India systems at Oracle, told IANS.

After becoming the leader in Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) and Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS), Oracle India is now focusing on the next big thing - Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS).

Kurian announced a series of new cloud infrastructure services - elastic compute, docker capabilities, archival storage and database migration.

The Oracle cloud continues to show strong adoption, supporting over 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day.

It runs on more than 50,000 devices and more than 800 petabytes of storage in 20 data centres around the world.

"Cloud today is changing the business models of several companies. Having a presence in cloud is tantamount to the tremendous success of businesses globally," said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president (converged infrastructure) of Oracle.

"Enjoy Oracle cloud right there at your data centre. We will build it, patch it and transport right in your backyard. You run it and we will take care of the security and performance to our best," he announced.

The conference, which ran October 25-29, took place at 18 locations throughout downtown San Francisco with the Moscone Center serving as its epicentre.

Over 60,000 people, including several innovators of Indian origin, from 145 countries attended the OpenWorld conference which was also webcast.