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    Oracle unveils big ticket expansion plans in India

    Synopsis

    In a fillip to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Digital India" initiative, global software and cloud major Oracle on Friday unveiled three big ticket investment plans.

    ET Bureau
    NEW DELHI: On her maiden trip to India, Oracle global chief Safra Catz announced a $400 million expansion of their India facility, a host of incubation centres for startups and an extensive training programme to groom young talent in the country. Catz, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier in the day said that the new Oracle campus, which will come up in Bangalore will be its largest centre outside the US.

    “Oracle has been in India for over 25 years and during that time we’ve grown our investments tremendously,” said Catz who currently shares the CEO position with former HP chief executive Mark Hurd. “In fact, India now represents our second largest employee base outside of the United States, with nearly 40,000 current employees and an additional 2,000 current job openings,” she added.

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    The construction for the centre will begin in March and it will house over 11,000 employees. The company which has close to 38,000 employees in India out of its global workforce of 1,30,000 is also looking to hire 2,000 people across various functions such as engineering, sales and marketing, global support etc. “We ‘make in India’ for the world,” said Catz.

    Catz said that she keenly studied some of the government of India’s marque projects such as Digital India, Make in India, Smart Cities, Start-up India and all of them can gain tremendously by the use of cloud. “All these projects are dependent on new cloud technology which will help the country leapfrog from old to new technology,” she said adding that Friday’s discussion with Modi revolved around how technology can bring about transparency, accountability and efficiency in governance.

    Catz also announced an expansion of its training programme. Oracle Academy which currently partners with more than 1,700 educational institutions in India to train students in computer science education will expand its partnerships to another 1,000 institutions in India, with an aim to train 500,000 students annually. Globally, Oracle Academy trains more than 2.6 million students in 106 countries.

    Catz also hinted that Oracle, which already has data centres in the country may look at expanding them in the future given the many business opportunities in the country.

    The Economic Times

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