Oracle will hire between 20 and 30 new sales staff in New Zealand this year, as the tech giant continues its Cloud growth across the region.
Following the unveiling of plans to hire 1,000 new staff across Asia Pacific, the vendor has confirmed to Reseller News that the recruitment spree will include New Zealand, as it ramps up sales of its Cloud offerings.
“There will definitely be new staff heading to New Zealand,” confirms Tim Ebbeck, Managing Director, Oracle Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re looking at bringing in between 140-150 new staff to the A/NZ region, and we expect the Kiwi market to take around 20 percent of that figure. But at this stage we haven’t finalised exact numbers.”
Given the recent withdrawal of Symantec’s enterprise sales team in New Zealand, Ebbeck was quick to reassure the market that the new staff were in addition to the “great team” already operating on Kiwi shores, insisting that the move is to “essentially add to the team we already have, not replace.”
Stemmed from strong cloud growth, Ebbeck says the new sales team will be tasked with selling offerings around software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as the vendor experiences “significant demand” in the market.
“We’re seeing increased demand in three areas of cloud,” explains Ebbeck, speaking exclusively to Reseller News. “Not just in the software-as-a-service area which has been a principal area for us, but also in infrastructure-as-a-service as well.
“Furthermore, we’re experiencing growth in the Platform-as-a-Service space, and everything below the software application layer such as Database-as-a-Service, Identity-Management-as-a-Service.
“If you look at Oracle, our pedigree has been for a long time in hardware and extremely large applications for enterprise but what we’re seeing now, as organisations see greater efficiency, is that businesses are taking their services into a cloud based environment.
“While it’s been on the cards for a while now, this era is really starting to take off.”
According to Ebbeck, New Zealand is one of, if not the leading, market for innovation in the world, as the company continues to enjoy rising sales in Cloud-related deals.
“There is a big demand to do things a bit differently in New Zealand,” he observes.
“Maybe that’s because of the remoteness and that the infrastructure from a computing perspective hasn’t always been there but from a Cloud perspective, the Kiwi market is looking at it in a slightly different way.
“While we have datacentres in New Zealand, from speaking with Government and private organisations, there is a strong incentive to make sure that cost and process improvements that come through the Cloud are adopted as quickly as possible.”
But despite the rise of Cloud on Kiwi shores, Ebbeck admits that the New Zealand market is also “very committed to the on-premise world”.
Sector wise, the public sector in both New Zealand and across the Tasman in Australia continues to adopt a Cloud first mentally, a move stemmed by strong work from Government to help drive adoption levels across the country.
In terms comparing and contrasting the Australian and New Zealand markets however, Ebbeck takes a different approach to many vendors.
“I don’t see Australia as one market, never mind New Zealand,” he adds. “Of course there are a lot of commonalities but New Zealand has specific requirements that are relevant to that market, likewise with Western Australia, or Sydney.
“In fact, Western Australia is further away from Sydney than Auckland so yes, remoteness and scale does make a big difference, as well as infrastructure which is crucial to run Cloud services effectively.”
Regionally speaking, Ebbeck says the A/NZ market is unsurprisingly leading Asia-Pacific in terms of Cloud penetration, with the vendor now looking to capitalise on such growth with its new round of hiring, a move which signifies the importance of New Zealand in the vendor’s wider Cloud strategy.
