KEY POINTS:
Half A world away from the Louis Vuitton Cup in Valencia, Oracle New Zealand's new country manager, Peter Idoine, has found a way to safely navigate a common question.
"Everybody assumes that we [Oracle] are a boat company at the moment and that we have a division called the America's Cup division," says Idoine.
He is referring, of course, to the multinational IT company's high-profile sponsorship of the BMW Oracle Racing syndicate, Team New Zealand's arch-rival in the battle for the Auld Mug.
If non-techie New Zealanders know anything of Oracle, it is that the company's co-founder, Larry Ellison, is a flamboyant yachting-mad billionaire we love to hate.
Ellison has pumped millions of dollars into his campaign to secure the sport's top prize, snaring Chris Dickson along the way.
"It [the America's Cup] is the one thing that people are keen to ask me about," says Idoine, who joined Oracle about two months ago.
"And they're also keen to ask me about my allegiances."
His response to the question of which syndicate he supports: there are more Kiwis crewing the Oracle-sponsored boat than aboard Emirates-sponsored Team New Zealand, and more Americans on the New Zealand boat than on the BMW Oracle boat.
"So I actually consider the BMW Oracle boat to be more of a Kiwi boat than Team New Zealand."
Idoine, a keen sailor himself and a veteran of the IT vendor-management game, was head-hunted to take the helm at Oracle New Zealand after long-time company stalwart Robert Gosling was promoted last year to an Australian-based role as vice-president of technology sales.
Idoine, having overseen major change as country manager for Sun Microsystems, was shoulder-tapped by Oracle.
He says where Oracle has the larger-than-life Ellison, Sun has its own charismatic co-founder in chairman Scott McNealy.
"They [Ellison and McNealy] both have those big personalities which have a big influence on a company. It's really good fun to work for companies where it's clear that somebody is trying to understand the strategy and bring it all together and make it happen. It was a factor in me considering joining Oracle."
So, apart from trying to stymie a return of a yachting trophy to these shores, what is Oracle's game plan and what impact is it having in the New Zealand IT market? Across the board, this country's IT vendors seem to be in pretty good heart at the moment.
Businesses are in a mood to spend on the lucrative enterprise resource planning (ERP) database and software systems at the heart of corporate technology systems, provided companies like Oracle can convince them there will be a good return on investment.
For global ERP heavyweights like Oracle and SAP, however, challenges are coming from smaller, nimble rivals offering increasingly popular over-the-internet "software as a service" solutions.
Another hyped technology both the big and smaller vendors are scrambling to promote is service-oriented architecture (SOA), a kind of modular approach to corporate technology architecture.
Oracle, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year and has been in New Zealand for 20 years, started life as a database provider.
Idoine says while databases continue to be the company's bread and butter, its growth strategy involves increasing profits from the software-applications side of the business.
Over the past three years, Ellison has led Oracle down an aggressive acquisition path aimed at boosting the company's ability to provide applications to customers across a full range of industries.
Idoine says he has no inside knowledge of the company's global acquisitions strategy - "In fact, I think there's quite an industry trying to predict that" - but he does pull out a chart showing how the company's "solutions footprint" (the range of services it offers) has been growing as it takes over more specialist businesses.
"Without a doubt Oracle is getting much closer to its customers because our relevance to them as a partner or a vendor is much stronger now than ever before," he says.
Apart from keeping an eye on the yachting, Auckland-based Idoine spends much of his spare time immersed in ice hockey. His three sons all play the sport and two represent New Zealand at their age level. Idoine is also webmaster for the New Zealand Ice Hockey Federation.
