'Almost all our training revenue comes from large Oracle customers.' - Andrew Killen, Vice President, Education, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corp

Amongst the ERP vendors like SAP, Baan and QAD, Oracle has taken a definitive lead in terms of the number of certifications across manufacturing and financial application areas. While the Indian sub-continent is the mainstay for individual certifications, the rest of Asia Pacific revenue is driven by corporate training for end user customers. At a recent meeting in New Delhi, Andrew Killen, spelled out the outlook of this ecommerce major across a multitude of areas like web-based training, growing domestic services market and the export of Oracle professionals from the country. Killen has been with Oracle for the last twelve years and with the education division for the last six years. Excerpts of the discussion:

What is the extent of learning services offered by Oracle?

We provide a complete education solution for our customers. It comprises of instructor-led training and technology-based training. We can do training over the internet and we can provide training across an intranet. We also have management and performance consulting services.

I think that provides a very strong competitive advantage for us because if we look at what’s happening in the market–organizations realize that they have to embrace internet computing. If your business processes are unable to be updated dynamically and if they are currently in a paper-based system or in a book, you might as well have them set in concrete.



In terms of revenue, Oracle is probably the #2 global training vendor. What contributes to this huge inflow?

Oracle understands that our customers do not just buy technology–they need a business solution from us. So we need to be able to provide the best services to ensure customer success with the application. If you look at what it takes to be successful, you need very good technology and we believe that we are the leaders in the technology that we have. But after that it is really the people that govern the success or failure of a large IT implementation.



What is the mix of components that contributes to this revenue?

We have a very strong core of instructor-led training and we have rapid growth in other media–technology-based training. We can certainly provide technology-based training over the internet and performance consulting and change management. So it is really a broad array of services that are growing very strongly.



How does Oracle view the training market in India?

In India we see that there is a huge populace and India has a strong reputation for information and technology skill. So we have embarked upon a program to take IT literate people and re-skill them to Oracle technology career programs. These are people that are probably not Oracle users but are individuals who want to improve their skills to have a better chance of getting jobs on the global market. We have developed training programs in India to take these people to the certified professional level to enable them to get jobs with our customers both in India and internationally.



In terms of Oracle certification where does India rank amongst Asia Pacific countries?

India probably has the fastest growth in Asia-Pacific at the moment, but it is not the highest yet . In Asia-Pacific, Korea has the highest. I think that is partly because of the economic process they have been through and also from the fact that there is a huge Oracle installed base in Korea. 



And with the rest of the world...

If you look at the size of the Oracle installed base and the actual tests that we do here, it is being embraced faster in Asia-Pacific. So although the absolute number of tests is higher in the US, if you look at the size of the Oracle base in the Asia-Pacific, the number of tests is actually larger here.

I think that a lot of certification in India is definitely for export because the IT spend relative to the population is small whereas in Australia it is very large. So India would be a natural supplier of skilled labor for other parts of the world.



What is the composition of individual and corporate training revenue in your overall revenue?

Globally, almost all our training revenue comes from large Oracle customers–there is a percentage that would come from private consultants who gain their living out of that. But in India, a significant part of the revenue does come from individuals because there is a market for re-skilling here, to get jobs for our customers outside of India and within India.



Are you saying that typically you negotiate a training contract with a global enterprise at the same time as a product and service order?

When we define a solution for our customers it would include a comprehensive education plan with multiple delivery methods depending on the organization, how they are organized and how they are spread across the country. It would be different for each organization.



In other words your partners are expected to discuss training services with prospective customers?

Yes.



Suppose the body shopping market did not exist globally, what would happen to your training revenues in India and overall?

It would be less in India but globally there would not be much difference.



The IDC forecast for services indicates that China, India and Korea would be
at par with Australia by 2003. Does that influence your market development strategy in any way?

I think there is a huge potential here as well and we will rely on partners when you have got a huge geography.



Again, looking at the domestic market in 2003, the body-shopping phenomenon and individual certifications may not be as dynamic as it is currently. And currently corporate training is not a significant amount of your revenue. Therefore, would you be able to scale up your corporate training strategy revenue to a satisfactory amount by then?

I think we are ahead of the game here for corporate training. It is just that we have got a very successful individual career program going as well that we do not have in other countries.



In other words, is the individual certification program unique to this country?

We have certifications but it is the Oracle customers that we are looking at and you have got different dynamics in different countries. In Australia a lot of people in the market have got long track records of doing these sorts of projects and they have got a CV and they have done this before.



So they may not necessarily have a certification, is that what you are saying?

A lot of them do but I guess there is a lot of them that don’t as well. A lot of them have done the certification without actually having done any of the training because they have been using Oracle for a number of years in a production environment.



How do the salaries of Oracle certified professionals compare with Microsoft professionals?

I don’t know but I imagine it would be higher because the skills and competencies required to implement large-scale manufacturing and financial applications are more complex compared to Microsoft applications. I know that manufacturing and financial skills in the US are very highly sought, so the salaries will be very high.



How do you use end user feedback to modify course curriculum?

We are in contact with our large customers about how they would like to see the curriculum evolve. I think the main areas we are focused on are financial and manufacturing kind of applications. You have to get a curriculum that is process or job role based in addition to being feature functional. So we are putting a lot of efforts into developing process-based training in addition to the feature function training and the Oracle tutor product enables us to
dynamically generate end user customized training.



With Oracle focusing on its e-suites product line and business, do the current certifications help deploy ecom application?

The competency is in the certification in terms of the technology infrastructure that you need to implement an ecommerce backbone. If you look at the big sites they are all using Oracle.



But what about the requirement of smaller ecom sites?

That is something we are looking at now. There is such a huge range of different types of ecommerce solutions–we are looking at what you could actually develop on the business side in addition to the technology side. 



Does that mean introducing a business management type of approach into the curriculum?

Yes. We are thinking about how we should best do that. We got the technology piece, now we need to look at the business. 



The general comment from ecom startups is that technology is available but the knowledge about business reengineering may be lacking? 

I think technology is crucial. I think we are in a position whereby having done that and got the enabling amount of technology we are leaving that area. We can now focus on the business pieces, which is what we are doing. Certainly we have got groups of people within Oracle whose function it is to assist our customers on the business but so far we are still looking at how to develop content to train people in that area. So we have got our own internal expertise to help customers to implement the business part of it, but we are looking at how to incorporate that into the training content.



Do you have any alliances to support you in the development of courseware?

We work with NetG to build the technology base and the training pieces of our curriculum.



What about courseware for the internet?

The NetG content is internet enabled.



How much demand are we seeing for training on the internet?

It varies from country to country. In Australia we see a strong demand to put training on the internet.



What will be your position in the domestic education and training market in 2003?

I think it will look like it does now. It is just that it will be bigger.

Arun Shankar 

in New Delhi