Karlin Lillington in San Francisco
The sovereign debt crisis in Europe has not noticeably damaged revenue at technology giant Oracle -- at least, not from the countries in southern Europe, Loic le Guisquet, executive vice president, Oracle EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) has claimed.
When specifically asked about revenue impact from sovereign debt countries, including Ireland, Le Guisquet left Ireland out of his reply.
“Some of our better years in Europe have been when it has been really difficult economically. It sounds strange, but there’s an explanation for that. We have done very well in southern Europe in the last couple of years, and that’s because we have the tools that help our customers to reduce IT costs.”
In line with company policy, he declined to break out revenue figures for individual countries. However he later noted that he was including revenue from France --a significant Oracle market in a country that has not required a bailout -- as one of the states in southern Europe.
Speaking at a briefing at the start of Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s annual user conference in San Francisco, he said customers could make savings of 30 to 40 per cent by consolidating databases using Oracle’s cloud technologies.
“For those economies that are challenging in Europe, this technology comes at the right moment,” he said.
In the briefing, he noted that AIB was one of its customers using Oracle technology to reduce the number of its databases.
“AIB have 10 times less databases to run, and have been able to compress all that in a very compelling way.”
He acknowledged European organisations were concerned about ongoing revelations about the surveillance capabilities of the US National Security Agency (NSA), making some feel wary about working with American cloud providers.
“I am unable to say whether this will last or is just an overreaction or not,” he said, adding the company felt it was important to have two European-based data centres, in Scotland and Amsterdam.
“We feel it is important for us to have the ability to host cloud services in Europe, and we are massively ramping up all our cloud services in Europe,” he said. “But we also have the ability to have companies host a private cloud. If they want to have it in their (own) data centre, they can.”
He said that it was unlikely Oracle would develop separate data centres for each European country, as recently proposed for cloud providers by the EU. Oracle would find other approaches, including working with partners, he said.
Le Guisquet noted that the EMEA region generated $11 billion (€8.6bn) revenue for Oracle for fiscal year 2013, logging $2.4 billion in first quarter revenue for fiscal year 2014.
“In EMEA, things are happening very fast. There’s a lot of fast changing trends,” he said, including cloud computing, big data and the analytics processes that enable organisations to extract valuable information from huge databases, all core Oracle product and service areas.
Oracle has 23,349 employees in the EMEA region, and is hiring aggressively in Africa, one of Oracle’s fastest growing markets, he said.
“Africa is a buoyant place full of a lot of opportunity. It’s the fastest growing continent currently; seven of top 10 fastest growing countries are in Africa. The middle class has tripled in size the last few years, so a lot of changes are happening super fast.”
In his opening keynote on Sunday, Oracle chairman and chief executive Larry Ellison announced changes to its databases that he said would enable database queries to be executed 100 times faster, while also at least doubling the speed at which transactions, such as online sales, could be processed. Using these built-in features is optional for customers.
He also announced the availability of the M6-32 , a “big memory machine” for crunching huge amounts of data. Ellison claimed the M6-32, which features double the memory of its predecessor the M5, processes data faster, while costing less than competitor IBM’s comparable machine.
