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Tech Interview

Oracle oozes market confidence
During his visit to Dhaka, Malcom C Logan, director, Data Warehouse & Business Intelligence, Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific Division, Australia shared with In-charge of The Daily Star Tech Nafid Imran Ahmed about the Oracle operations in Bangladesh and also his thoughts and professional experience. Excerpts:
NA: This is your first visit to Bangladesh?
ML: Yes it is. I have had the pleasure of coming to Bangladesh for the first time and it has been a great experience.
NA: Where do you think Bangladesh stands in the global ICT industry?
ML: I certainly feel that Bangladesh has a growing economic position within the South Asian area. It has a growing level of sophistication in customer base. It has dynamic organisations who are taking the advantage of the sophistication of customers and brining solutions and consumer products in markets. I believe it's a country of proud people and they want to move on and enjoy innovation.
NA: What are some of the primary issues your company is focusing today in this country?
ML: When we look at the issues in the telecom market place around the Asia Pacific,
there are lots of different trends that are going on. And the trends include the innovation of new products and the growth in market, which is a common thing in Asia Pacific's telecom investment environment. The idea is to consolidate application and processes into smaller manageable units. Oracle tends to focus on reducing the complexity instead of managing the complexity. There are organisations in Bangladesh that have grown and now want to move to that next step forward. We assist them with solutions and technology. Our business partners approach them and say We can help you do this'. We use our experience and solutions in technology to enable you to seamlessly grow and meet your customer market demands. That trend is happening in Bangladesh and also in other Asian countries. It's a very good sign for a growing economy and willingness to invest and move the market.
NA: So far we have seen state telecoms monopoly BTTB and the largest private telecommunications company in Bangladesh adopt Oracle solutions for billing system, are others interested to go along the way? Are you approaching them?
ML: We certainly like to believe that they are interested in adopting such technology. Along with technology we also
provide consulting services ... and part of those we would like to think is that we bring values to these organisations.
From interactions with these organisations we know that we do bring value and their feedback into the developmental enhance products and services. We feel the Bangladesh market is open to that creation of innovation and provision of products and services. And certainly we would like our position and our offerings to operate within Bangladesh saying 'here is world-class technology and solutions' and certainly we would like you to avail yourself of them to promote and facilitate your organisation and we shall support you in doing that. We would like to share these experiences and opportunities if you want us to.
NA: What are some of the opportunities here you are focusing on at present?
ML: I think the opportunity for Oracle in Bangladesh market is the Bangladesh market as a whole. As it is a grown economy, there are sophisticated and growing customers and organisations that want to grow. So Oracle would be absolutely more than happy to share its experiences, products and services with these organisations to deliver values back to their share holders, to internal processes and also importantly to their
customers. Because value from the customers of these organisations will generate loyalty for that organisation's customer base, which will increase the revenue stream.
NA: Any future projects you can speak of?
ML: Certainly the telecommunications industry is dynamic and Bangladesh is no exception. It has a series of focused operators who want to deliver values, increase their personal market share,
increase revenue, want to bring the right product and service to the market place at the right time. And there is competitive nature within them to do that and a great environment that would benefit the subscribers as well as the customers. We would like to be a part of any organisation who wants to bring that value to them.
NA: Tell us something about Oracle's "grid" computing, one of key issues that are in focus now.
ML: The 10g database is the recent enhancement in this sector. It's a fantastic technology that saves organisations a lot of money. It allows organisations to develop business and technology flexible environments, it allows them to sit back and say, "I have an opportunity of deploying a billing system, a enterprise resource planning system, a data warehouse environment, a CRM system at the same time."
It enables scalability -- the ability to do technology upgrades on the fly and provides access to data all the time. This is grid computing. And you can do this on low cost and high cost computing environments, as well. It's your decision. We have customers in the Asia Pacific, specially in the telecommunications sector who are moving from the Oracle 9i release to real application cluster environ-
ments, across to grid environment and they are running this on Dell PCs in Linux environment. And they are supporting data in amount of terabytes. So this is high-powered and affordable application solution for any organisation. And Oracle database on Linux operating system is just fantastic low cost, full redundant environment for business pleasure. So the grid environment is a growing scene and a lot of our customers are appreciating this technology and want us to educate them more to improve their systems and processes through this technology.
NA: Oracle is a strong backer of Linux and sees developments in the Asia-Pacific region as the key to a genuine alternative to Microsoft's Windows platform what is your opinion on this?
ML: I agree. It's not only an alternative to Windows platforms but also to Unix platforms from the mainstream Unix providers. The beauty of Linux comes into its cost aspect. There are a lot of people who like the concept of Linux. The recent growth of Linux and how it has accelerated over the years is amazing. But if you look at Unix today, it has not enhanced much as it was twenty years back while running in the IBM mainframe computers. Linux is low cost, powerful, flexible, can be
deployed on hardware choices and you can run Oracle on it. And the flexibility it offers sort of takes away from the people's idea of the Microsoft environment. Every time a virus comes out, the Microsoft environment might go down, that can be a reason for not choosing it. Decision against Linux or for Linux is dividable on a personal choice. We are seeing a lot of organisations considering Linux because of its low cost, stability, availability on platforms of choice and of course the fact that it works.
NA: We have heard about future oracle software for the personal computer using Linux - anyupdates?
ML: We recently did some work with Dell in China market, where we have Dell PCs and one of the options you can have is select oracle database on your PC from dell.com. That gives people another dimension to their personal computing initiatives from a deployment or working on applications or just doing any exercises. We are creating an opportunity for a different segment of customers to make them understand the power of Oracle database. It also allows them to develop their personal skills and an opportunity for learning and to create a value in the market place for themselves.