The Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is enjoying strong growth, despite tough economic conditions.
That's the word from Lo"ic le Guisquet, Oracle's executive VP for the region. Le Guisquet, who is responsible for managing all of Oracle's operations, growth and profitability throughout the region, says its 61 countries contribute one-third of worldwide revenue, and is enjoying 29% year-on-year growth.
“We're even hiring across the EMEA region, strange though that may seem in the current the economic environment.”
He said customers are choosing Oracle during tough times because less complexity means there are more possibilities for innovation.
“We're trying to pre-integrate more and more components in the stack, so that they're ready to go. That's a big difference from what happens currently, where people choose BD [big data], operating system, database and middleware, and then try to stitch them together.”
There are three major pressures on companies to innovate, he noted.
“The cloud is a major factor that's driving change, what customers do and how they deploy systems. Then there's social networking at large.
“There are Generation Y people arriving in the enterprise and all the analysts say that by 2020, roughly half the workforce will be from Generation Y. Those people are hitting the workforce and they have a totally different expectation of how IT systems should behave and what work environments should be like.
“Also, their work and private lives are very blurred and our systems need to be able to cope with that. The third driver is big data. The quantity of data collected is growing exponentially.
“If we were to put all of the data we had now in the world in paper, it would go to Pluto and back 10 times. By 2020, we guess there will be 35 exabytes on hard drives.”
He said one organisation using Oracle tools to plough through big data is the CERN research lab.
“CERN produces massive quantities of data - 15 million gigabytes that they produce every year - and they need to keep it for 20 years. They are on the verge of confirming that neutrinos can go faster than light. The answer to that will come from a deep dive into that data.”
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