Published on the 25/03/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Oracle’s cloud epiphany came late, now it’s playing catchup, looking to hire 1000 new salespeople across Asia Pacific to promote cloud solutions, just as quickly as it can…
As part of an APAC-wide recruitment drive Tim Ebbeck, managing director of Oracle A/NZ, said he is prepared to pay market rate for the right people but is adamant, “we don’t need 45-year-old men in grey suits, I’ve got a lot of those”.
Instead he’s looking for a more diverse range of salespeople able to evangelise and sell Oracle’s cloud solutions either directly or in concert with Oracle partners.
“We don’t want substandard people. This is part of the regeneration of Oracle,” said Ebbeck at a media event in Sydney yesterday.
While the company is primarily focusing its recruitment efforts on growth in Australia, Greater China, India, Korea, and the ASEAN countries, there are roles being created across the APAC region. Oracle is looking to add 150 cloud salespeople to its existing 450 strong Australian sales team.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that the company now describes itself in media releases as The Cloud Company (its capital letters) having been so slow to embrace the cloud.
In 2008 founder and then CEO Larry Ellison described cloud computing as “gibberish” even though a decade earlier he’d invested in and helped found cloud-only vendor NetSuite.
Perhaps NetSuite’s success was the acid test because, finally, in 2012 Ellison announced the Oracle Cloud, acknowledging at the time “it’s been a long time coming”.
Ebbeck said that in New Zealand and Australia the company had been through a “period of transformation” and that by mid-2014 it started earning more revenues from cloud than on-premise solutions. But he acknowledged that Oracle “has not always been the most friendly organisation to deal with”.
The transformation has forced a re-education among existing Oracle staff said Ebbeck, who noted “we are spending a lot of time reinducting people,” and part of that re-education has had to be about remuneration models. While in the past on-premise sales could net a salesperson a hefty bonus, Ebbeck acknowledged that “a lot of the big deals aren’t there any more”.
Instead cloud sales are subscription sales often completed in 18-32 days, he said.
Those initial months of contact are crucial according to IDC analyst Chris Morris who stressed the importance of the early phase of a cloud deal to vendors saying that 30-40 percent of the total three-year lifecycle costs of a cloud deployment came in the first six to nine months of a project. “This is where the cloud makes money for them, on the services wrap around,” said Morris.
