Oracle's way to quality control

By ADAM GIFFORD

Oracle chief information officer Gary Roberts can empathise with customers wrestling with software implementations.

Not only has he done it as a customer, salvaging a $US30 million ($68 million) Oracle project at drive maker Seagate, but he is now required to implement all new Oracle applications internally before they are made generally available.

Mr Roberts was in Auckland last week, something he said would be more common for Oracle senior managers as the company tried to sustain the 45 per cent revenue growth the Asia-Pacific region experienced in the first half of Oracle's financial year, which ends in May.

He said Oracle's strategy of using its own technology arose from a disaster soon after he joined three and a half years ago.

"We were trying to implement the latest release of the client server version of the Oracle email server, which was definitely a broken product.

"Because of the turmoil we went through trying to implement that product, we didn't have e-mail for four days in the United States - and at Oracle, if you don't have e-mail, you're dead.

"Because of that [chief executive] Larry [Ellison] recognised the value of information services as a check and balance against development."

Mr Roberts said that since then information services executives had shared the boardroom table with development executives.

"The process we have now is as products are developed, we take them and implement them internally, and provide Larry with a summary of what's working, what's not working, what can definitely be improved. We're the final quality assurance."

He said that although almost any software company was good at developing product and doing function testing, integration and scalability were often lacking.

At present the company is shaking out the bugs in its 9i database, which is due for release in March.

Mr Roberts said that if the customer got a more bug-free product there would be fewer support calls, improving the vendor's margin. He is charged with implementing Mr Ellison's plan of cutting up to $US2 billion from Oracle's operating costs by shifting to internet technology.

While competitors claim it is "undressing in public" and analysts are sceptical of some of the figures, it is clear considerable efficiencies have been gained.

In information services, staff numbers have dropped from 1500 to just under 1000. Mr Roberts said that had not meant redundancies, as surplus staff had been redeployed into the growing company to revenue-producing areas like services or sales.

Corporate databases have been centralised. Instead of running 97 e-mail servers and 120 e-mail databases around the world, the company's 1.2 million daily e-mails are handled by two Machines and four databases.

The Netscape browser is used as the email client, reducing desktop support issues.

Mr Roberts said Oracle expected explosive growth as other companies came to understand the savings which came with browser-based computing.