New man at top of Oracle NZ is longest-serving Kiwi employee

By Stephen Ballantyne, Technology writer

Friday 5th July 2002

ROBERT GOSLING: 'What I bring to the party is an extremely good knowledge of the New Zealand market and an equally good understanding of the Oracle products'

Oracle's New Zealand operation has a new boss - long-time Oracle sales director Robert Gosling has taken over from South African-born Leigh Warren, who has moved to Melbourne to direct the company's business partnering activities in Australia.

After a two-year spell at the top of the local operation, Mr Warren's legacy has been a business showing outstanding performance compared with Oracle's other regional operations. Two days after taking over as country manager, Robert Gosling talked about his intentions for Oracle.

As Oracle's longest-serving New Zealand employee, Mr Gosling has experienced all levels of the company from sales rep on up. "There were about five sales reps in Wellington when I was recruited in March 1990, out of a total Wellington staff of about 24. I was brought on primarily to manage government business. And we're still getting a lot of government business, although the amount has tapered off over the years.

"But we've had some particularly good success with government over the past year with the i-procurement business, which was an exceptional win for us - probably the most important strategic win of the past year, with a great potential downstream impact.

"We're hoping that will give us good exposure within departments and we'll certainly try to leverage it in the future. There's a lot of discussion going on around the potential of shared services piggybacked on i-procurement."

Although Mr Gosling is based in Wellington he doesn't regard the business as particularly concentrated there: "We probably do more transactions in Auckland than in Wellington but the transactions in Wellington tend to be larger. If you look at the National Bank, Fonterra, Telecom and some of the big government businesses, it's a different sort of business. The revenue is evenly split but the transaction volume is greater in Auckland.

"Historically it really hasn't mattered where we've had our country manager. We run as a single virtual office, so we don't really worry about whether the customer is in Auckland or in Wellington. Similarly, we have people deployed where we hire them, so when we recruit people like new account managers, we advertise in both Auckland and Wellington and hire the best.

"Anyway, as a former sales rep I'm well used to commuting between centres. For the last two years I've been spending at least two days a week in Auckland and I can see that continuing.

"Experience from the ground up in all parts of the business, particularly sales, is hardly going to be a disadvantage. An organisation like ours is dependent on our success in selling, whether it's licensed products or our consulting and implementation services.

"What I bring to the party is an extremely good knowledge of the New Zealand market and an equally good understanding of the Oracle products. I know what we're good at."

Mr Gosling's arrival also brings some changes. "Part of my new role has been to disestablish my previous role (as sales manager). That's because we want to get much closer to our clients in the sales process. We've changed our structure so that we have team leaders in each of our key business areas, along with specialists for major enterprise clients, specifically Telecom and Fonterra.

"Our approach depends on what our customers buy: either technology - meaning our database or our applications server - or applications. There's different buying behaviour associated with each type of sale; people who buy applications tend to go through a complex formal request and procurement process that runs over a long period of time. It's usually very business- and solutions-focused.

"On the other hand, technology sales are necessarily very technical, to technology people, and are generally concerned with providing infrastructure that people will use later to build business solutions. So we've split our sales team into two main divisions, one devoted to technology, the other concerned with applications.

"We also have a large installed base of applications clients, so we have an account manager whose full-time job is looking after that installed base. Generally the organisation is being considerably flattened - the team leaders will answer directly to me in future.

"They're all very experienced account managers, recruited into those roles from similar experience in the past. They understand client needs. The application leaders are business-focused - they already know what a general ledger is, what a manufacturing company does, what a distribution company does, and so on. The technology people come from technology backgrounds, so when people want to talk to them about networking and data warehousing and databases and so on, they'll know what they're talking about.

"We've actually been moving towards this for quite some time. Leigh and I have been discussing this transition process for the past six months and the focus going forward will be the execution of this strategy."

When Oracle declared its intention a few years ago to aggressively promote its applications business, it seemed as if it was in search of a strategy to advance beyond the saturated database market, which it dominates. It appears to have worked, especially in New Zealand, where the proportion of Oracle's applications business is somewhat higher than the world norm.

"That's a reflection of our own strategy and the maturity of our market. We have a large market share in the technology space, so to grow we had to make a strategic decision to promote our applications business. That affected the way we staffed our business, how we went to the market and our whole strategy.

"It's been very worthwhile - the applications business has a huge pull-through effect, not just for us but for the whole Oracle eco-system, including the big four and other consulting organisations. The applications business is much harder, because it's very competitive, but the rewards are higher when you are successful."

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