Spotlight on a Career Path: Raghu Raam Joins Oracle Applications Development Team in Hyderabad

Hi all, I am Raghu Raam. After completing my B. Tech at NIT Trichy in May 2012 I joined Oracle Applications division in Hyderabad 9 months ago.

What is Oracle Applications?

Let me start with a brief introduction on Oracle Applications. Oracle as an organization needs no introductions. The world leader in RDBMS and No.1 in around 50 industry segments. Oracle Applications is the application software division of Oracle which consists the ERP software of Oracle viz. Oracle E- Business Suite, Oracle Fusion Applications, People Soft, Siebel, JD Edwards to name a few. At this point last year these names did not exactly ring a bell with me either.

To give you an idea the clients of Oracle Applications include NASA, GE, Cisco, Facebook, ICICI Bank, Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Boeing among others. If you research, you will be surprised that even if you have never heard of Oracle’s ERP products until now how many products/services you use in turn use Oracle Applications.

I work on E-Business Suite a suite of around 190 products which was started as a single product 25 years ago.Oracle Fusion Applications is the next gen ERP software with the services offered from a cloud.

What I do at Oracle?                               

Since I joined Oracle I contributed to two versions of product releases. The framework/ languages you work will vary based on the team you join. Whichever team you join the knowledge of databases (a ERP software is just an interface to perform DB operations) , distributed systems and basic programming concepts will be surely helpful. There are a lot of things to be learned from a product of the scale as EBS. Working on widely used large software like this has helped me learn a lot on portability and performance analysis in particular. You might have a chance to work on SQL queries running to thousands of lines or on platforms as varied as HP, AIX or Solaris. I work in a team whose utilities are coded in C, Pro *C, PL/SQL, Perl, Java and I had the chance to develop and fix issues on every one of them. There is a lot of interesting developments a happening constantly as is evident from the fact that my team has recently applied for about a dozen patents for the work done in the past couple of years.

In addition to the conventional language level coding you might also get to work on Business Intelligence Tools. In this regard do not worry if you are not exposed to any of these languages/tools (as freshers you are not expected to know them). You can enroll for the training classes conducted by Oracle after joining here if required for your team or you can get the help of your team members to get to know these better.

The most appreciable part of the work is that there are opportunities for the developer to identify avenues for improvement and take the initiative and pursue them. The developers have freedom and support in the regard.

Who I work with at Oracle?

Oracle is a global organization with Development centers in Europe, China, India and USA. The HQ is in Redwood Shores, USA and in India most of the Applications team is based in Hyderabad and Bangalore. Most of my team mates are based in Hyderabad, India and Orlando, USA.

Why is Oracle a fun place to work?

There are team lunches, team outings, weekend get together, TGIF parties, Volunteer clubs, cultural clubs, cultural festivals, intra and inter organization games.

In addition what makes the actual working fun is the rapport I have with the team mates and managers. They are helpful and co-operative and it’s a totally informal setup outside of work. (My manager is my friend on FB something which I did not think would happen a year ago). Flexible working hours and working remotely are allowed (obviously some justification needed). Helps you balance work and personal life.

For those joining Hyderabad:

Hyderabad is a great cosmopolitan city and all of Oracle’s offices are in Hi-Tech City. Lots of places to visit on weekends and enough entertainment to keep you busy on weekends!

Note: Most of what I have described are my experiences and might be particular to Oracle Applications though the work culture is essentially the same across the entire organization.