Oracle continued to top the database charts by far, but, more significantly, it upped its overall ante in the entire enterprise applications space, gradually emerging as a challenger to SAP. This was spurred by the Peoplesoft and JD Edwards ERPs as well as Siebel CRM finally getting completely integrated into one single Oracle family. Not only did these global acquisitions of the last two years help Oracle increase its market share in 2005-06, it also enabled it to significantly beef up its infrastructure here in India.

Oracle's gradual emergence as an enterprise application company was best exemplified by the full-blown solutions deployment that happened in organizations like Maruti and LG during the year. The acquisition of majority holding in i-flex too aimed to leverage the strong presence of Flexcube in banking; however, the lower presence of i-flex in the domestic market meant that Oracle India did not gain much on this count. However, e-gov was a strong focus area, especially with its center running in conjunction with HP piloted several government-related applications throughout the year. And as with most other vendors, SMBs too were courted aggressively, contributing to nearly 40% of its business for the year.

Oracle launched its Embedded Business Unit for APAC and Japan, catering to the embedded systems market in this region, including India. Oracle completed the first phase of its Hyderabad campus, focused on applications R&D. It also announced major expansion initiative for the Hyderabad Development Centre with plans to increase its head count to more than 3,000.

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