Oracle warns Republic must move up the tech food chain to compete

Imagine being an outspoken kind of guy forced to work for a boss who always expects you to be restrained, gentle, and polite about the competition.

Fortunately for Oracle vice-president and chief marketing officer Mr Mark Jarvis, he has Mr Larry Ellison running the show and few tech chief executives impale the competition faster on a cutting remark than the wisecracking database king.

That means that, while talking to The Irish Times during his recent review of the troops at Oracle's internet sales division in Dublin, Mr Jarvis can remove the gloves fairly quickly. Discussing databases and Oracle's roster of rivals, he'll say with a dry laugh: "I don't think Microsoft is ever going to solve their security problems." Or, noting that IBM is giving away its database program DB2 for free "in order to get consulting and hardware sales", he'll add, "If it's free, you have to look at what free gives you." Not much, he suggests. "I think IBM will never be a true software company. They're becoming a services company and will always be a bit slow and stodgy in software," he adds.

Those are the kind of remarks smaller companies can't afford to make for fear of creating powerful enemies. And, with few exceptions, most larger companies will lean forward and ask that such remarks be kept off the record. But for Oracle? Audacious chutzpah is a trademark. Wimps need not apply. Nor those inept at the art of the poker face.

Only Oracle's chief marketing officer could smile sweetly and say, "I don't think we're over aggressive in sales" - when Oracle's sales team is famed for its gung-ho style and ability to squeeze a commitment to a software purchase out of previously reluctant companies.

On the other hand, the success of a company is directly tied to the ability of its sales force to close deals, and technology companies in general are so widely acknowledged as masters of the hard sell that one has to laugh at the notion that any one company - especially among the big players - is particularly over the top.

One of the company's more interesting moves recently has been to market the idea of giving companies greater processing power for far less cash by clustering relatively cheap servers running the open-source operating system Linux. Linux is a hot offering at the moment, with most non-Microsoft big software and hardware companies queuing up Linux-based products and services.

Mr Jarvis says Oracle is putting its money where its mouth is: "Every one of our internal systems will be running on Intel Linux clusters. As Larry says, that's because it's far more reliable." Companies are "still kicking the tyres" a bit, as Linux slides from the margins into the mainstream, but Oracle counts 300 customers up and running on Oracle Linux clusters.

"I think Linux has come out from underneath the desk of the developer and the chief information officer is taking it seriously," he says. Oracle figures the offering also carves out a compelling corner of the market for them and shuts out arch-rival Microsoft. For every feature Microsoft introduces to its server and database software, Mr Ellison asks Oracle engineers to analyse how it compares to Oracle offerings and, when creating Oracle software, to determine how long it will take Microsoft to incorporate a similar feature, says Mr Jarvis. In this case, Oracle believes it has a 10-year headstart on Microsoft's ability to offer a similar product.

Still, markets are slow, he acknowledges. Companies spent too much in the boom and now are reining in too much in the downturn. The company doesn't want to make any predictions on the future of the world economy but seemed to have measured its own situation fairly accurately when it met market expectations with muted financial results last week.

He's proud of Oracle's internet sales division based in East Point Business Park, which employs 440 of the company's 1,000 Irish workers and pulls in 30 per cent of the company's European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) revenue. Mr Jarvis makes sure the sales team knows what it is selling - the division has put in place Oracle's own customer relations management software on all desktops to streamline the way sales are managed.

Oracle has cut employees globally again recently but Mr Jarvis says the Irish sales team is in a favoured area: "Most of them are doing internet-based sales and internet-based sales are the future of our company," he says. Nonetheless, the Republic needs to remain competitive and already he sees places like India and China offering it a serious run for tech company money.

"The challenge for Ireland is that Ireland did a great job of bringing technology companies into the country. Now it will have to move up the food chain. The reason tech companies first came here was brawn - Ireland had the employees. Now, the brawn era is over and the focus is brains."