Bengaluru, July 16 (IANS): Global software major Oracle Corporation has its second largest workforce in India, with 10 product development centres across the country, a senior official said on Thursday.

"Of the 120,000 workforce we have globally, 31,000 are in India, making it the second largest after our employees' strength in the US," Oracle president Thomas Kurian told reporters at an event here.

Of the total workforce, 30 percent (36,000) are in product development worldwide and one-third of them (12,000) work in India.

The database product firm opened its 10th product development centre in the Gujarat International Finance Tech City (GIFT) at Ahmedabad recently.

"We hired 2,300 engineers during the last fiscal (FY 2015) for product development functions in India of which 18 percent were graduates," Kurian said on the occasion, marking the IT multinational's two decades of presence in the sub-continent.

Indian centres are part of the company's global product development organisation, and teams do cutting edge engineering work across the product portfolio, including cloud.

"Our teams play a crucial role in propelling product innovation and support its agenda of developing cloud-ready solutions," Kurian asserted.

Oracle opened its first product development centre in Bengaluru with four engineers in 1994 and since then grew its footprint across the country, with more such centres in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and Vijayawada.

"As engineering talent is in high demand, we have been recruiting aggressively to become the world's top cloud provider. Our global development centers are the lifeline of Oracle's success, and India is a major part of that," Kurian said.

The data base company spent a whopping $34 billion over a decade in innovation and research and development (R&D) to roll out best-of-breed products in the industry.

"Though many Indian enterprises want to use our products, some of them are unable to do so due to lack of infrastructure. Anyone can run our software with a web-browser and even without data centre or hardware-software," Kurian claimed.

The company's cloud offers software as a service, platform as a service, data as a service and infrastructure as a service.

"Our cloud platform helps organisations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs and reducing complexity," Kurian said.

The latest version of the cloud platform enables customers to build new applications, extend present applications and move workloads to the cloud without changes.

"The new platform allows developers to manage and analyse data, develop, test and deploy applications, and facilitate architects to integrate them," Kurian said.