The tech giant's new managing director in Ireland says operations must remain cost-effective and productive to compete with cheaper centres, writes Karlin Lillington.
Paul O'Riordan, who has just climbed into the driving seat at Oracle Ireland as managing director, will be at the wheel of an Irish division almost unrecognisable from the tiny sales office that first opened nearly 20 years ago.
With an eye on Government departments, a handful of large organisations and a growing number of American technology companies setting up operations in Ireland in the late 1980s, Oracle figured there were reasonably good pickings here deserving of an office and about a dozen people.
Two decades later, the company employs nearly 1,000 people in Dublin and insiders say the Irish division is the best performing operation in Europe for the database giant. The sales division alone is many times the size of that original group, and there are five sections of the company's global operations based here as well, doing everything from shared services to software development.
"We're a fairly big company in the Irish context and I think also a great advertisement for Ireland Inc," says O'Riordan, who in January succeeded Nicky Sheridan - now managing director, Oracle South Africa - in the firm's top job in Ireland.
O'Riordan comes to the position after several years heading up Oracle's Irish consulting division, and prior to that he worked at Horizon, Irish Distillers, Ebeon and for nearly a decade at Accenture. Accenture was an excellent training ground, he says. "I learned so much, and it gave me a lot of very good grounding. For a company of its size, it was remarkably agile, reinventing itself three times while I was there."
Of Ebeon, one of the more spectacular Irish dotcom failures, he says: "Everything Ebeon wanted to do, and said they would do, they delivered on. But the business model was wrong."
He has relished running Oracle's consultancy division here, he says, and the consultancy background is what he feels gives him a good overall sense of what Oracle customers in Ireland are looking for.
Although O'Riordan says Oracle won't break out sales and revenue figures or performance for individual countries, he says the Irish office has performed very well across the various vertical markets it addresses.
"We're also not dependent on any one vertical, we're performing in them all," he says.
He is not faint-hearted in setting future goals either. Regarding its sales and services division here, he says: "We want to double sales, in absolute revenue terms, in the next three years."
With the company now able to provide products and services for the large enterprise to, more recently, the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME), he thinks sales will be brisk, especially in the SME sector.
Comments made to The Irish Times last summer by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison indicate that the company is indeed quite satisfied with its operations here.
"We were attracted first by the tax breaks and the lower cost of labour. We still get a low cost and highly skilled labour force [in Ireland]," he said then, noting that the company gives its largest pay rises here because the buoyant economy means it can be hard to hang onto good employees. Indeed, as O'Riordan points out, Oracle can't even get all the employees it needs, with dozens of jobs open at the company's Irish operation at the moment.
If anything, this is one of the company's biggest concerns, he says, and must be seen as one of Ireland's major issues.
"The biggest challenge we as a country have is feeding the job pipeline. At any time, we have at least 50 jobs open. The people aren't there to fill them," O'Riordan says.
Ireland needs to be producing more business and technology graduates and also to recognise it badly needs talented immigrant workers too, he says.
He'd welcome an open and positive immigrant strategy from the Government, he says. He is also concerned at the high minimum salary of about €50,000 per worker that the Government wants to bring in as part of its work permit system for non-EU workers, a figure well above the salaries that the vacant jobs at Oracle command.
O'Riordan says Oracle Ireland's biggest challenge is keeping a wary eye on the low-cost centres around the world. This means Irish operations need to remain costeffective and productive.
"All the people that run the operations here are passionate about showing how we do all this stuff better," he says. "China is churning out four million science and technology graduates per year. We can never forget that."
As for the big Oracle picture, it is an exciting time to be working for the company, he says, with Oracle going through a period of rapid growth based on a strategy of acquisitions.
In little over a year, Oracle has digested former rivals PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, making it the second or third largest software company in the world - depending on who you believe - trailing Microsoft and, probably, IBM as well.
Recent deals have expanded its commitment to an open-source strategy and there's no sign of the company's acquisition appetite diminishing, despite concern from some analysts, who worry the company may overeat and suffer the consequences.
"I think what Oracle has is an ambition to be the top global software company," says O'Riordan. "There are really only four right now - Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP. The best way for us to grow is acquisitions. We're doing it to fill gaps or get new industry solutions. It's our stated strategy, and we have a good engine for integrating [ acquisitions]."
What might be next? "Believe me, we all say, 'What's the next one going to be?'," he says. Any Irish possibilities?
He laughs and notes that acquisition strategy is so secretive that he has no idea if anyone from Oracle has ever been in Ireland to study the possibilities.
Maybe next year, though.
That's when Oracle Ireland will celebrate 20 years here, and O'Riordan would be delighted to see Ellison in Ireland for the party.
Going on current form, he should still be carrying around an Oracle corporate shopping list, so who knows?
