Oracle’s Palanivel Saravanan On Building AI-Ready Infrastructure For Startups to Scale |
Oracle’s Palanivel Saravanan On Building AI-Ready Infrastructure For Startups to Scale
With platforms like UPI processing over 19 Bn transactions a month, India’s cloud ecosystem has shifted towards scale-first, distributed infrastructure
In an interview, Palanivel Saravanan, vice president, cloud engineering at Oracle India, explains why early cloud decisions now shape product outcomes, with cost predictability, latency, security and AI readiness becoming critical from day one
As complexity increases, the focus is shifting to simplifying multi-cloud, embedding security into infrastructure and building AI systems closer to core enterprise data
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Over the past decade, India’s cloud ecosystem has moved from being an enterprise-led, cost-optimisation layer to becoming a foundational driver of how digital products are built and scaled.
What began as a shift away from on-premise infrastructure has evolved into a far deeper architectural transformation, shaped by the rise of digital public infrastructure such as Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). With platforms like UPI now processing over 19 Bn transactions a month, the demand for infrastructure has fundamentally changed, pushing companies towards stateless, distributed, and highly resilient systems.
At the same time, cloud is no longer a backend decision. It is increasingly tied to product experience itself, with latency, cost per transaction and scalability becoming critical variables from day one. This shift is playing out even more sharply as AI adoption accelerates across sectors, leading to an increasing demand for high-performance infrastructure and data proximity.
India’s public cloud market, estimated to cross $30 Bn by 2029, also sees a more nuanced evolution. While the early adoption was driven by cost arbitrage and agility, enterprises and startups alike are now focussing on predictability of spend, security-first architecture, and the ability to operate at massive scale without repeated re-architecture.
This maturity is also bringing trade-offs. Multi-cloud strategies, once seen as a default hedge against vendor lock-in, are increasingly being reassessed because of their operational complexity. Regulatory expectations around data sovereignty and compliance, particularly from authorities such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), are forcing companies to rethink how and where data is stored and processed.
Few leaders have had a front-row seat to this shift as closely as Palanivel Saravanan, vice-president of cloud engineering at Oracle India. Having spent over two decades in the industry, he has seen India transition from monolithic systems to distributed architectures and now towards AI-first infrastructure.
In a conversation with Inc42, Saravanan spoke about the inflexion........