Oracle wins in the Gulf (page 1 of 2)

By WILLIAM MILLER DUBAI
Build a better mousetrap, goes the saying, and the world will beat a path to your door. That's a nice idea - that the secret to success is innovation - but is it reality?

When it comes to information technology, the answer is no, or at least not always. Think about it: what do today's IT clients want most? Not necessarily the very latest technology, but the technology that works with everybody else's technology, that will make doing business easier and faster and, most of all, that won't crash and cause disruptions.

Domination. Hand it to the Oracle Corp., then, for its brilliant new marketing campaign. The California information-management software giant - with annual revenue in excess of $10.8 billion and a dominating presence in the Middle East - has just one word to say about its products. "Unbreakable" strikes home with clients everywhere, especially after September 11th, even as it promises the impossible.

Oracle's enormous success surely owes something to its superior technology. But the company has also shown a flair for salesmanship rarely seen in the region. Take the case of Dubai, starting with Oracle's winning the rights to host the Tejari.com platform at its own facility in the United States. Tejari, a government B2B, is one of the Gulf's highest-profile e-ventures, an online marketplace floated in early 2000 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai's crown prince and the UAE's defense minister.

Oracle rolled out the red carpet to get itself on to the project. Larry Ellison, the company's CEO, was enlisted to woo Sheikh Mohammed and his project team. Late last year, Oracle hit a new high by bagging a contract for providing the platform for Dubai's e-government. "It is a very different Oracle that the industry is seeing now," says a regional marketing manager with a leading US software company. "Earlier, it was just not as much in the limelight, and there were equally good vendors competing for the same space.

"Looking back, the Tejari victory was a major coup for Oracle, despite it being a well-known fact that it had to heavily subsidize to get in on the ground floor. It's standard practice for IT vendors to get large-impact customers by offering them better terms. But they used this leverage to get to the other Dubai-based enterprises, which had to align themselves with Tejari, whatever the cost imperatives for their own organizations."

With Tejari, every procurement and tendering procedure that the various Dubai government departments enter into is done online. Even before Tejari became operational, a host of Dubai government departments had signed on. Dubai government-owned entities and the top of the private sector soon followed. "Tejari was one initiative that could not be allowed to be fail under any circumstances," says a senior official closely associated with the project. "The Dubai authorities had a lot riding on it. Local enterprises simply had to be seen to be getting onboard early."

This is where Oracle made its brilliant play of pitching its wares, say IT industry sources, not without a touch of envy. "There was one Dubai organization still using legacy applications," says a senior IT manager with a Dubai government department, "and they were doing quite well despite that. Sufficient pressure was subtly put on it to shift to Oracle, the reasoning being that, otherwise, the organization would not be able to use Tejari's services."

That is where the substantial cash flow comes in for Oracle.