By Bankole Orimisan
THE Director Middle East and Africa Hardware Presales of oracle Corporation, Bernard Tischendorf, has disregarded gossips that Oracle was no longer interested in hardware business.
Tischendorf, who visited Nigeria recently, said in Lagos that the company was still interested in hardware and that was shown full proof ‘in our research and development (R&D), which covers our hardware line of business.’
According to him, Oracle was investing ‘so much in R&D in all its three lines of our business, which include software applications, technology and hardware.’ He said that the invested year we invested over $4 billion in R&D alone and hope to increase the amount in subsequent years.
He stressed that as much as the company was paying attention to R&D, “we are also looking at customers demand and customers always come out with products and services that will meet and surpass their demand.”
Tischendorf noted that his visit to Nigeria was to carry out crusade of hardware business to attend Oracle seminar which “we are organising for our customers”.
He said that the reason for the seminar was to see and discuss what they had in their portfolio, right from hardware, server, storage, and then their new version2 product, to tell, “Nigerians that we are still very much interested in hardware and that we have the best solutions out there and that we have a strong and efficient team in the country to deliver all of these.
Oracle is committed and customer-focus and we have come to prove that in Nigeria.”
He stated that the company was also looking at Virtual Desktop, which saves the customer from rolling out too many PCs, but to rollout various operating systems.
According to him, for the Oracle hardware market they still ran a separate line of business hardware. “We have three lines of businesses. “We have hardware, technology, which has to do with database and then software applications. What this means is that we can run other databases on Oracle hardware and we can run any one of our software applications on any other hardware other than Oracle. This gives customers the flexibility to do business.
“What we are saying is that we can give the customer everything from Oracle perspective, right from software applications to hardware. If customers take our three lines of services and apply them, they will get better customer experience. Oracle-to-Oracle makes better sense, because it works much easier. Customers have the choice to combine all the three lines of business offerings or choose to use one or two only. But should customers take all three lines of our business, such customer is sure of high speed, manageability, flexibility among others.”
Outsourcing, Tischendorf, noted that it made good business sense, but Oracle was not into outsourcing.
According to him at Oracle, the bottom line was to satisfy customers in areas of their needs and challenges, and that was exactly what the company did in their research and development.
“We have several solutions to boost customer experience and for us to consider outsourcing, we will first look at those that handle outsourcing business. Although Oracle does not involve itself in the business of outsourcing, but we believe strongly in it that it works for those who engage in outsourcing. If you look at small and medium size enterprise market (SMEs), people do outsourcing because it enables them to focus on their core business” he stressed,
He noted that there was nothing more challenging in the Nigerian market than other African markets. “We have almost the same experience in other African countries, from the user perspective. In a nutshell, business in Nigeria is pretty okay.”
On their the strategies in Nigeria market, the Oracle director explained that the company had a strategy that would position it to have local representation in Nigeria in order to have wider coverage. “Right now we have up to 16 hardware personnel on ground in Nigeria and that is an improvement from what we used to have.
“We need them to talk to customers and have one on one contact with them. We want to have contacts with those we are dealing with in the market.”
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