For most US IT companies bent on expansion overseas, the
first port of call is typically the UK where at least the locals
speak (almost) the same language as they do in San Francisco. That
was the case when Oracle first set up shop in the UK in the 1980s,
run by a team of formerICLexecutives.
Oracle UK had a powerful and individual identity. This sense of
self was undoubtedly helped by the rise to the global number two
slot of the UK's Geoff Squire. But once Squire left the company, US
executive Ray Lane took over and the sense of identity began to
morph into something else.
Lane didn't want to know about ideas such as Oracle UK or Oracle
France; he wanted to think in terms of Oracle in the UK or Oracle
in France. (His stance was reportedly made all the more hardline by
an attempt by Oracle France to change the corporate livery from red
to blue on the basis that red, for some reason, wouldn't work in
France!) Oracle has been working more and more towards the creation
and cultivation of a global identity that supersedes national
borders.
That said, it still comes as something of a shock to realise
there is no country managing director for Oracle UK. Indeed, the
latest head of Oracle EMEA doesn't even think in terms of Oracle
Europe, despite his own job title. "Oracle in the UK, Oracle UK -
that's all disappeared. There's not really an Oracle EMEA or an
Oracle Europe," says
Loic le
Guisquet. "As a company we are global in certain dimensions and
local in others. We have country leaders in every country in order
to keep the countries focused on the specific needs of the
countries, but they don't own the business in those countries.
That's been gone for a long time. We've gone away from having
country heads who had their own HR departments or their own
marketing departments inventing local marketing collateral."
Doesn't that risk Oracle being seen as a US firm embarked
effectively on technological and economic colonialism? Can European
customers expect Oracle bosses in San Francisco to appreciate their
needs? "It's always interesting to be heading up an EMEA business
for a US headquartered firm. Europe is a very sophisticated
environment, with many different languages and cultures, different
ways of buying, different holiday seasons and so on. But I am
fortunate that we have two Presidents at Oracle in the form of
Charles Phillips and Safra Catz who travel a great deal and who
understand Europe very well. Some of my peers in other US
headquartered firms might find aspects of their role challenging,
but Charles and Safra come to Europe all the time."
Le Guisquet sees the globalisation push as an inevitable and
perfectly reasonable evolution."I've been with Oracle more than
twenty years now so I've seen many phases of its development. For
EMEA, we operate in 147 offices in 58 countries," he adds. "I can
give you examples of us working locally in societies. For example,
we are working in Switzerland with local homeless charities. On the
other hand, we have things that are totally global, such as our
billing systems business for telcos. That's a totally global
business unit. In most of our offices, we play a part in the local
community as our employees take on activities. We have the Oracle
Academy, for example, where we help support 400,000 students and
teachers in 60 EMEA countries."
What's more important than national infrastructures, maintains
le Guisquet, is maintaining a clear view of the identity and needs
of the local customer base. "Innovation doesn't just come out of
laboratories; it comes from customers as well," he says. "That's
why we make sure we engage as much as possible with our customers.
We have 30 customer advisory groups in Europe who are there to help
us to get customer input into what it is they would most like to
see us do and get into our products. What is it that would help
them the most? What are the feature sets that would make the most
sense from the customer perspective? It's this that helps us to
leapfrog the competition. I can think of a couple of good examples
of innovation in action in Europe. CERN is regarded as being at the
leading edge of innovation. The data that is produced by the Hadron
Collider comes in to a huge grid system that completely embraces
and uses the most futuristic technology that we have.
"Or there's the business example with BT. BT's been using our
technology for a long time, but they're now using our business
intelligence capabilities so that 10,000 users can access data on
their customers behaviour. This is paradigm shifting for BT as it's
allowing them to do real time decision making. Rather than having a
big database of customer behaviours and buying patterns which they
can then mine and analyse, they are now able to turn call centre
agents into the people who make those decisions. Rather than having
them follow a script which they hope might match some customers,
they can create the right package and offer on the fly that will
match specific customers. So even a junior call centre agent is now
able to make very smart proposals based on the needs of the
specific customer. They've used this for outbound calls, now they
plan to move it on to inbound calls." Le Guisquet has stepped up to
the mark as the head of EMEA operations at a difficult time. He
assumed the role last December, just as the economic crisis was
gathering a head of steam. He has taken charge at a time when
Oracle's EMEA revenues have been under pressure. The fact that this
is a global crisis and that rival firms, such as SAP, have been
under the same pressures doesn't make his life any easier.
But le Guisquet can see a glimmer of light at the end of the
tunnel according to figures from a Financial Times study. "Based on
their findings, the economic situation in Europe at the moment is
not much different to how it is in the rest of the world. If we
could go back in time to last July and look at the forecasts then,
it looked a bit bleak then, but the economy has worsened throughout
the world," he notes. "But we have seen some good signs. For the
first time in 4 quarters we've seen some signs of improvement. We
can see that the economists are forecasting that things are
improving and we obviously hope that the good signs are going to
translate into better times for customers."
While he argues that the economic situation is essentially a
global situation, le Guisquet does highlight a particularly
European aspect to it. "We have a specific situation in Europe
which is having an unfortunate impact on everyone," he explains.
"Eastern Europe has been a big engine of growth with some Western
countries investing more than their GDP in Eastern Europe. That's
left some countries more exposed than others. It's difficult to say
which countries in Europe will come out of recession first. The UK
adopts innovative technologies very quickly and I think it's doing
very well." While he insists that he can't predict where and when
recovery will happen on the basis that he's not an economist, le
Guisquet does offer one interesting theory on the subject. "If we
look at the recovery from the point of view of industry sectors,
what we see is the telco industry doing very well overall," he
suggests.
"There's also a lot of innovation going on in the public sector
where there's a lot of pressure to simplify and improve processes.
Perhaps surprisingly, we see the financial services sector doing
rather well. That sector hasn't collapsed as you might have
thought. Financial services companies have a lot of legacy systems
that they need to improve so they're still investing in doing that.
I think manufacturing companies have been more badly hurt than many
other sectors. In general, countries that have more services-based
economies will come out of recession quicker while those that are
manufacturing-heavy are likely to struggle a bit longer."
He also argues that the oft-cited time lag between the US and
Europe can have its advantages, enabling European firms and
economies to learn from mistakes made across the pond. "One of the
things about Europe is that the reaction to European peaks and
declines is roughly about 6 months later," he says. "Now the good
thing about that is that it gives us time to adjust and prepare for
our customers. You can do a number of things to prepare and get
ready. So we have done a lot of things to help customers through
that. We have focused on helping people to save costs because we
know that's what they're going to have to do through this crisis.
We're trying to help them streamline their processes. But of course
it's also the right time to plan for future growth and invest. But
it takes time for people to adjust to a crisis and to move on."
When it comes to investing, le Guisquet argues that Oracle's
completeness of vision is a critical differentiator for the
firm.
"We follow a very clear strategy. We want to be as complete as
possible. We want to offer a comprehensive solution, from the
front-end CRM through to billing and provisioning and so on," he
explains. "We can provide customers with a complete solution, but
we also want to be able to present it to them in an integrated way,
rather than have customers have to buy it in a piecemeal way. We
want to create a footprint in all the specific industries. We are
organised for a number of lines of business across countries. We
understand inside out how a retailer works, for example. Knowing
about your customers and your customers' business is what really
matters."