Trust and speed driving customers tech journey with Oracle

“Speed comes from having a rich set of applications while the trust comes from the security in the OCI layer,” explains Chris Chelliah, SVP, Technology, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific.

For Chris Chelliah, SVP, Technology, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific, there is no barrier to tech adoption for Oracle’s customers in the Asia Pacific market. With 12 cloud regions in APAC, the vendor also has cloud regions connected with Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.

“Every service we roll out is available everywhere and that's unique. So for businesses in our market, the ability for us to say, no matter where you are, we'll play there with you. There's no barrier to adoption for our customers in our market. The world's population in our backyard. It's a huge opportunity for us to take this innovation,” said Chelliah.

Chelliah mentioned that there are strong customer conversations in the region, from the Pacific Islands to all across South Asia. As governments in the region have been publishing AI frameworks, he believes this is driving the private sector at a much faster pace and also enticing the public sector to start thinking about adoption.

“The work we have done with Singapore, with the defence agencies for example, in giving them a complete air-gapped footprint to run AI services kind of explains that they can adopt and the private sector should also be able to drive fast adoption,” he added.

Interestingly, Chelliah believes the regulated industries are still waiting to tiptoe, regardless of being a mature or developing market.

“There are two currencies in the AI world. It's trust and speed. Sometimes they can be divergent. If you go too fast, you don't get trust out of it. We're focusing on bringing those two currencies into a converged environment. So regulated industries are relatively still cautious,” said Chelliah.

Echoing Chelliah’s sentiments is Sunil Wahi, VP, Solution Engineering, Applications, Oracle Asia Pacific. He commented that every industry wants to do something with AI.

“There are so many use cases today, and the imagination is to go ahead and build what you want to build and then start deploying it in an agile model or in a hackathon model. We can show you in a few hours what you were thinking and demonstrate it as a process. And that gives them confidence. Then the cloud infrastructure comes with such a massive, secure layer of confidence that customers are ready to take that leap,” said Wahi.

Working with partners

Both Chelliah and Wahi also highlighted the importance of Oracle’s partner ecosystem in getting organizations to embark on their tech journey.

“They (partners) see us as key enablers in what they need to do really fast. If you look at the announcements of the AI data platform and Oracle AI Factory, I was just zapped by the reaction from the partners. In less than 24 hours, since the marketplace was announced, many partners have committed to the agentic flows. Every partner is coming out with their imagination or their experiences and bringing that domain expertise. So the industry flavors and recipes of what they have sought in customer implementations is essentially getting converted into agentic workflows coming out as these amazing use cases,” said Wahi.

Wahi also mentioned that this is driving adoption tremendously in the customer landscape.

“I was in a pretty large workshop with a customer, and there were multiple partners who came in. Every partner started their conversation with AI agents, and they started demonstrating use cases of what they have done, how have they enhanced the fusion applications, agentic workflows and such. This is just an example to show you the pace at which work is happening. That's why I said the currency of AI is trust and speed,” added Chelliah.

Chelliah explained that the speed comes from having a rich set of applications while the trust comes from security in the OCI layer. As speed and trust in AI also involves meeting data sovereignty, Chelliah also believes that this is moving away from just being geographical boundaries.

“Sovereignty goes beyond geographical. It can be within the enterprise. Just like how a VPN connection works for service in the office. Because when you connect on the VPN, you're in a trusted environment. So, AI is going to be like that. You're going to want the agents to run right next to you, inside your firewall. My competitors don't even have this on a roadmap. Our design principle was everything, everywhere. So, it's chalk and cheese. We have this rich stack of applications, data, and infrastructure, and we can have it wherever you want it,” he concluded.