Sydney pips Auckland for Asia-Pacific centre

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland narrowly missed out to Sydney as the location for database and application software giant Oracle's Asia-Pacific shared business services centre.

The centre, due to open next January, will employ 80 staff and take over responsibility for Oracle's back-office financial work for 13 countries.

New Zealand manager Leigh Warren said external consultants were used to choose from a shortlist of Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane.

A big factor in Sydney's favour was that it already had most of the capability, knowledge and people to run the systems, he said.

Two staff would transfer from New Zealand, but none of the 150 staff here would be made redundant.

"We will look at its effect and see if we can streamline things here, but our target is to do better things with our people, rather than have fewer people," said Mr Warren.

"In the past, that part of the business has been about how to get stuff in the system and through the books. People here will be looking at doing more management reporting and trends analysis rather than basic administration tasks."

The shared-services centre is part of Oracle's moves to turn itself into an e-business using its own applications. It is centralising systems and databases, with the aim of eventually running all computing functions from one global centre.

Since starting down that track a year ago, Oracle has saved more than $US1 billion ($2.2 billion).