Oracle evangelist hones geek-cred

Bob Shimp

After flying from Silicon Valley to Sydney, Bob Shimp, vice-president, technology marketing, has just completed his first mission - to spend an hour enthusing a crowd of Oracle customers.

"I always worry about wearing pin-stripe suits and giving talks because your credibility drops by about 50 per cent right off the bat," he says.

"I suppose if I came in with a screwdriver in my pocket I'd be much more effective."

While the suited look fits Shimp's dapper, greying features, it's also easy to imagine him in dress-down screwdriver mode. This is an IT executive who says his hobby is computer programming and who has degrees in electrical engineering, public policy, business administration and law - the thinking geek's marketer.

Then comes another admission: Shimp says his job is getting harder.

"In the past - many years ago - computers were new and exciting, people may have not known precisely what they were for, but it was technology, it was the go-go 70s and 80s and they would just buy the stuff," he says.

"Today, people are a lot more sophisticated, a lot more knowledgeable and experienced with technology in general and most especially with computers and software.

"They have very high expectations of the technology and, in particular, they want to know what real benefit or value they are going to get."

The days of the "carpetbaggers", who dropped a lump of technology on your desk, have gone, he says.

"The industry as a whole has risen to that challenge. We are a great deal better about delivering real products and real solutions to people and there is less of the vapourware [products that are marketed before they are available] and so on that you may have had in the past."

Shimp was the top US executive sent to front Oracle Technology Summit - one-day presentations for the company's Australasian clients held in Sydney and Melbourne last month.

He has been with the software giant for eight years and began his IT career in the marketing department at Hewlett-Packard in 1981, when the company was focused on making instruments and computers were just a sideline.

"The actual computer manufacturing line was about 10 feet from my desk so while I was doing the marketing I could see how many computers were coming off the line and how many more we needed to sell that quarter."

Asked about Oracle's rivals, many of whom are offering what he calls "cheapware" alternatives to the company's flagship database solutions, Shimp says his biggest competitor is actually the filing cabinet.

"It's much more a question of growing the market and explaining to people why they need to manage their information effectively.

"The market has barely begun to be tapped for managing all of that classic unstructured data - the paper that's strewn across people's desks now."

Shimp remains a believer in that age-old geek nirvana: the paperless office. And yes, after spreading the tech message all day, this evangelist will often relax by indulging in a bit of database programming.

"I'm not designing the next great database but hopefully keeping in touch with what's going on.

"I think it's utterly essential for a good marketer to spend time actually understanding the technology," he says.

* Simon Hendery attended the Oracle Technology Summit as a guest of the company.

Who: Vice-president of technology marketing, Oracle.
Favourite gadget: Blackberry.
Next big thing: Semantic technology. "Enabling machines to communicate with each other - we're seeing a lot of our more leading edge customers picking this technology up and I think it's going to be a huge revolution."
Alternative career: Novelist. "Every good marketer is a good storyteller."
Spare time: Programming and playing around with technology.
Favourite sci-fi movie: Dark City.