In her first media appearance since being named Oracle Philippines country managing director two years ago, veteran IT executive Mina Lim boldly proclaimed that the software firm is ready to conquer the booming cloud market in the country.
Lim, who entered Oracle?s local subsidiary in 1993 and is the company?s seventh country manager, said the Silicon Valley titan has set its eyes on becoming the dominant cloud provider in the Philippines in the soonest possible time.
She said Oracle has the goods to compete with the current crop of big cloud players such as Salesforce, IBM, and EMC.
?We have the most comprehensive and integrated cloud portfolio in the business. We have the applications, middleware, and the hardware to become the number one in this field,? asserted Lim, who started out as a finance manager before rising to become the company’s first female chief.
As a manifestation of its aggressive strategy to lead in the cloud business, Lim said Oracle is now on the last stages of a massive hiring spree just to support its cloud business across Asia Pacific.
The lady executive said Oracle has so far hired more than 800 new salespeople in the region. The target is to employ 200 more for a total of 1,000 workers.
Lim was not able to say how many of the sales staff will come from the Philippines as it is the company?s policy not to break down figures on a per-country basis. However, a number of the employees that were already hired include returning alumni, she said. New recruits also come from line of business positions in a wide variety of industry sectors such as finance, manufacturing, telecoms and utilities, the company said.
Oracle’s fiscal fourth-quarter results announced on June 17 showed that the company overachieved in cloud, with cloud revenue already above a $2.3 billion annual run rate.
Oracle sold $426 million in new Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) business during the quarter, which the company said is ?more than any cloud services company has ever sold in a single quarter.?
