The US-based information technology company Oracle is building its team for marketing cloud applications in India.

The company is also now gearing up to serve business-to-customers clients directly through its recently acquired marketing software vendor Responsys.

In an interview with Business Line , Will Griffith, Sales Director – Marketing Cloud, Oracle Asia Pacific, shares more on India plans.

Edited excerpts:

How different will be your efforts around marketing cloud technology in India?

Marketing cloud is a fairly new area to Oracle. Oracle had marketing applications in the past, but it hasn’t been a major focus and now it is becoming an important strategic focus for Oracle. With the advent of the Internet, it’s democratised a lot of the ways in which buyers research and has changed the way they are engaged before buying anything.

And, that’s what our technology does — marketing cloud technology — for marketing departments to help them better their marketing campaigns, activities, tracking people, building digital body language and using that digital body language to work out whether this person is interested or not in buying services.

North America is the early adopters of this technology followed by West Asia, Australia and Singapore since last couple of years, and now we are starting to see our activities in India. We see lot of interests in marketing department wanting to be smarter using technologies because it is important for the business.

What trends do you see in India, especially with companies adopting more digitisation?

There is a big trend with organisations already making investments in other customer relationship management (CRM) technologies like sales force automation technology. They want to see how they can leverage those technologies to drive revenue — so they have got their CRM in place and manage the sales team. But, how can they make that sales force more effective is where they turn to marketing, and if we can create that as a combined engine, that will be great.

Two-three years back most of the organisations focussed on getting sales team right, but now they are thinking on mature marketing and adoption of better applications.

Do you see any impact with companies such as Zoho and Salesforce.com providing CRM solutions to many mid and smaller companies?

All of these companies take advantage of cloud-based technologies — they can be very agile — there are huge benefits of cloud and competitive advantages to some of the small businesses. We did a research in some of these mid and small companies in the US and West Asia and found that it’s actually the next wave of adoption of this kind of technology that is going to come from such companies. They can adopt, deploy and take advantage and can be a big game changer for them.

The best part about cloud is that the same application that a bigger company can get, a smaller company can too, and in their price brackets. How we price our customers depends on the size of a data-base. There are many small companies in India, which will explode in their growth in a year or two years and it is going to be a hot market.

How would the acquisition of Responsys help your business in India?

Responsys is strong in B2C technology. There are many companies in India for B2C technology and Responsys will give us a good start in the B2C space of marketing. It will serve to companies in manufacturing, FMCG and we will also grow the Indian market with many such companies whom we have been working globally and now coming here as well. You will see Oracle being known more for its customers’ experience, applications and things like marketing tools.

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