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There are a lot of initiatives of Oracle in ICT education, innovations in the area of the use of ICT in health care, in establishing e-Governance Centres of Excellence, and so on. What is the picture that your company has?
Oracle software and solutions are helping central, state and local governments streamline revenue generation and management, citizen services delivery and increase internal productivity. We had set up an e-Governance Centre of Excellence in 2003. Recently we have also set up an Asia Research and Development (R & D)  centre in Gurgaon. These centres are helping create interesting concepts that government can look at to meet the specific needs of India. These centres are also helping government, our partners and businesses create a roadmap for adoption of technology in a manner that is most beneficial to the people of India.

Which of the Oracle e-Government services find maximum demand in the public sector?
There has been an increase in government shared services initiatives as governments seek to optimise back office operations, assure best-practice standards across multiple agencies and rationalise platformsplatforms – a trend we see increasing in the future.

Tax and revenue agencies are at the forefront of adopting IT. Also government departments  dealing with citizens are looking for better ways of improving citizen services. The other area  where we will see increased interest in deploying IT is in automating the government  accounting system. Local government bodies have shown a lot of interest in adopting IT to  enable transition from a single entry accounting system to the double entry accounting  system. The central, state and local governments in India and across the world use Oracle solutions in several areas including:

• Creation of Citizen Data Hubs
• Putting Together Integrated Government Treasury Management Systems
• Creating an Information Architecture for Municipalities and Panchayats
• Creating an Integrated Land and Agriculture System
• Creating an Integrated Infrastructure Management System
• Putting in Place Centralised and Integrated Systems for
• Utilities Including Power and Water Management
• Handling Operations in Public Works Department Including Public Works Project Management
• Integrated Solutions for Learning and Education for All Levels i.e. K-12 and Higher Education
• Hospital Management and Integrated Healthcare Systems

What are the key factors that public sector should bear in mind while implementing e-Government solutions?

e-Governance does not mean just putting PCs and servers and deploying some software, it is  about using information technology to bring transparency, accuracy and speed into the  system, which ultimately will benefi t the common man. The implementation of IT should  increase the effi ciencies of the various government departments and help the citizens at large  by way of effective information management. Its about incorporating best practices and  domain knowledge to create a system that not only makes the internal operations of a  government department more effi cient but also helps the department to connect better with  other government departments and provide a holistic response to the citizen in a timely and effi cient manner.

“The implementation of IT should increase the effi ciencies of the various government departments and help the citizens at large by way of effective information management. e-Governance is about incorporating best practices and domain knowledge to create a system that not only makes the internal operations  of a government department more effi cient but also helps the department to  connect better with other government departments.”

What are the challenges that Oracle faces in implementingits solutions in the public sector, especially in developing countries like Asia?

Government projects are typically large with far reaching consequences and high citizen  impact. The challenges that we face in the government sector are similar to what we face in  large sized deployments in the private sector. Change management, longer decision making  processes and technology acceptance by end users are some of the issues that need to be  addressed in any large deployment of IT.

Can you tell us some of your success stories?

Oracle has over 100 live deployments in central, state and local governments in India. Some  of the well known projects include: e-Seva and rural e-Seva in Andhra Pradesh, local government projects in Uttaranchal, Assam PWD, North East VAT, Income Tax and Excise  Department projects, treasury automation projects across several states including Rajasthan,  municipality automation projects in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, West Bengal and  Maharashtra among others.

Oracle has recently been named the leading Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) vendor in India and Asia Pacifi c. What has led to Oracle’s continued leadership in database innovation?

Over the past thirty years Oracle has delivered virtually every noteworthy innovation that  exists today in the area of database and information management. Through consistent innovation, Oracle has enabled a fundamental change in the cost of hardware infrastructure  by supporting dynamic scalability even on the lowest cost servers, utilising all assets to their  fullest capacity and even adding new and unique capabilities – such as Flashback, Data  Guard, XML DB, Application Express, and Oracle RAC which continue to change the very  notion of what database software should provide.

Oracle Database 11g innovations in areas such as information consolidation, performance and  scalability, quality of service, and of course change management continue the Oracle  drive toward a low-cost and agile information infrastructure. We are sure these innovations  will help our customers in the government space even more.

What is your future strategy or plan to have more initiatives in the public domain?

We work with over 2000 governments across the world. Oracle offers governments robust,  integrated information architecture comprising both technology and applications, which is  based on open standards. As Indian governments start to use Oracle database, middleware and  applications, we are think the new features in our software can greatly help Indian  governments. For example, our enhanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and  Supply Chain suite of products have several new features that can help governments in their  interaction with citizens as well in their procurement processes. Our new database – Oracle  Database 11g – now offers greater scalability and security, two features that are extremely important to governments.

We have strengthened our focus on Government with a stronger team that works closely with  the e-Government Centre of Excellence, the Asia R & D centre at Gurgaon and our global  development centres in Bangalore, Delhi and NOIDA to bring innovative solutions to meet local needs.

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