Today Oracle announced the launch of India’s first Gen 2 Cloud datacenter in Mumbai, with plans to have 20 more regions live by end of 2020, including a second one in Hyderabad. 

The announcement was made by Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director of Oracle India in the presence of Bhavesh Zaveri, Country Head – Operations and Technology, HDFC Bank. Customers and partners in India can now harness the power of Oracle Cloud including cloud applications as SaaS, autonomous technologies as PaaS, and resilient infrastructure as IaaS to unlock innovation and drive business growth.

On the occasion, HDFC Bank and Oracle announced their commitment to bring more and more Indian citizens into the country’s digital economy through progressive digital banking. HDFC Bank has taken its services to the most remote parts of semi-urban and rural India. It has pioneered India’s digital banking revolution with its digital transactions growing to 85% last year[i]. Yet 72% of India’s consumer transactions are in cash[ii], and mainly in rural India (that accounts for more than half of India’s 1.3 billion people).HDFC Bank started its cloud native journey with Oracle Cloud by decomposing Oracle Banking Platform application into Microservices. The bank also automated its planning and budgeting functions using Oracle Cloud, eliminating all manual interventions and removing inefficiencies, thereby becoming the first large bank in India to do so.Additionally, HDFC Bank is in advanced stages of discussion to migrate its UAT (user acceptance testing) environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the India data center. 

Once implemented, it will enable the bank’s different departments – be it loans, risk, underwriting, marketing, analytics among others, to test new services in the ‘real world’, thereby speeding their ability to upgrade existing products, and roll-out new products quickly to customers. It will allow the bank to provide digital banking access to many more citizens.The game changer for financial inclusion and digital banking is mobile banking, loans and deposits. The main challenge in achieving this feat is in reaching rural areas. When HDFC Bank moves to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the bank will be able to integrate its new services and other digital banking services, including the thousands of API solutions (e.g. with online insurance providers, ecommerce sites, travel portals, online food delivery apps etc.) already available from the bank into other mobile applications, net banking, search engine results etc.Bhavesh Zaveri, Country Head – Operations and Technology, HDFC Bank said, “Since the launch of our Go Digital – Bank Aapki Mutthi Mein campaign in 2014 we have been working to bring on board those individuals that have still not embraced the digital economy, in line with the government’s Digital India objectives. 

We believe Oracle Cloud will play a huge role in easing and moving more users to digital platforms for banking services.”Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India added, “We are proud to bring to India the country’s first Gen 2 Cloud datacenter in Mumbai. We are thrilled that we got the opportunity to work with HDFC Bank to realise an important vision for Digital India and a clean India. We stand committed to India’s economic growth and believe our newest investment will aid the country to rise to new heights”.Benefits of Oracle Cloud that will empower HDFC Bank to create an inclusive digital economy include:Ability to co-opt and compete with fintechs in the disruptive digital banking spaceAbility to launch new services and products in a few weeks versus several months in a non-cloud environmentGuaranteed security, including complete isolation of customer data with off-box virtualization and dedicated CPUs – not shared or accessible to other customers hosted in the same datacenter nor by the cloud service provider (as is the case with today’s first generation datacenters)Heightened and predictable performance with non-oversubscribed resources and improved security of workloads with Industry Standard Encryption, coupled with AI/ML capabilities to manage the agile-infrastructureOracle Universal Credits (UC) pricing that is unique among cloud service providers. 

This provides HDFC Bank with flexible buying and consumption choices of cloud services and unlimited access to all current and future cloud services. This includes high speed data connectivity with Oracle FastConnect partners that commit to 99.99% SLAAuto upgrade: Oracle Autonomous Database will provide the bank with operational efficiency i.e. keeping track of data center assets, capacity planning, software upgrades, security patching, tuning, etc. without manual labour intervention. This will be done automatically for the rest of the life of the system.