Sergio Giacoletto Blog

If you are a young European IT entrepreneur with a good idea for a business, then maybe we can help you . . .

Last month on the 9th July it was my privilege to speak at an Oracle event in Bucharest where we were honoured by the attendance of His Excellency, the President of Romania. President Basescu gave the opening speech at the Oracle event where we launched the Oracle Innovate Program to encourage young Romanian entrepreneurs to create their own companies within the IT industry.

I am particularly proud of this new and important program, as it expands our commitment to educating and involving young people in information technology.

In Romania, and in many other countries across EMEA, we have implemented the Oracle Education Foundation’s Think.com program to develop computer-literate skills in schoolchildren from 9 years upwards. Following on from that, the Oracle Academy further brings more advanced technical IT education to students in high schools, technical colleges and universities.

Additionally, about 2 years ago, we introduced Oracle internships to give Romanian graduates real-time work experience to enhance their opportunities in the job market. It’s great to know that some of those internees have now gone on to become Oracle employees, and around 34 now work for our partners.

Now, the new Oracle Innovate program gives graduates the next step – to create their own companies in the field of IT. It is designed to identify, encourage and nurture innovative technology-based business ideas conceived by IT graduates. We have a process whereby in stage one ideas for new IT solutions can be submitted to the Innovate Greenhouse Committee for consideration. Successful concepts move to stage two where they could receive expert business advice, access to funding and free technical resources. We’ll help these budding entrepreneurs every step of the way to make their dreams reality.

So, overall, we now offer a complete range of IT programs for all ages, from primary schoolchildren, through to high school students and undergraduates, to graduate job opportunities, and now to help in the creation of new companies where the students themselves may eventually become employers within the IT industry.

I can’t think of a more dynamic industry sector today than IT. Technology plays such an important part in our daily lives - in banking, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, automotive, almost every industry – that it offers enormous, almost endless, potential for young entrepreneurs.

Toumaz Technology in the UK is a great example of a start-up in the UK that developed an Oracle technology-based solution in the healthcare industry to connect a mobile patient to healthcare providers via a body worn sensor which provides non-intrusive continuous monitoring of critical information.

Innovation is the key here. While low-cost wages might offer a short-term advantage to some countries in the EE-CIS region, this is not sustainable in the long term. Countries and organisations need to innovate. We sponsored an Economist Intelligence Unit Report – A Time for New Ideas: Innovation in Central Eastern Europe - and the findings show that there is not enough ‘home-grown’ innovation in this region.

However, these countries can take advantage of what I consider to be an ideal combination for success – youth, entrepreneurship and technology. Many of the largest and most successful companies in the world today have been formed by young people who had a great idea on how to use technology, and Europe has the potential to rival other regions if governments, industry and academia get together to create the right environment.

President Basescu was most encouraging in his comments:

“The project launched today by Oracle creates a connection between the processes of growth, specialization and integration of the workforce on the national market level. Only with the help of programs such as this one can the objectives of convergence with the other European countries be fulfilled. I wish to express, explicitly, the support of the presidential institution in the long term development of such business models and public-private partnerships that Oracle is consolidating today in Romania.”

I hope that, as a result of our Oracle Innovate program, in conjunction with our partners Spiru Haret University and Junior Achievement Romania, we shall in due course be listing the names of some of the new Romanian companies that we have helped get started. Stay tuned . . .

We’ll be taking the Innovate program out to other countries at the start of the autumn university year including the Czech Republic and Turkey. I am convinced that those countries that put IT at the core of their development make the most economic progress – look at the Nordics, Ireland, India – and hopefully we’re helping young Europeans take advantage of the enormous opportunities the IT industry has to offer.

It's been a busy couple of months in the Middle East, with several initiatives in suppport of our customers.

In March, we held our first-ever CIO Executive Summit in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.  We were privileged to hold the event under the patronage of His Excellency, Eng. Mohamed Jamil Bin Ahmed Mulla, the Minister of Communications and Information technology for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who addressed the delegates (some photos below). The Q&A and panel discussions were great -- very interactive and enthusiastic audience.  Top discussion points were on how the Saudi CIOs can monitor financial and operational results against goals, and apply analytics to improve their enterprise-wide performance. The feedback was really positive with several attendees asking for repeated sessions over the coming months, so we're already working on that.

While I was there, another 'first' took place.  The newly formed Saudi Arabia Oracle User Group was announced.  Last autumn the feedback from customer surveys showed that our Saudi customers were interested in forming a user group.  So this March the Saudi Oracle User Group was launched with Dr. Majid Altuwaijri, CIO, National Guard Health Affairs as the President of the group.  I am grateful to Dr. Altuwaijri for his support in leading this autonomous group of 14 distinguished CIOs from various industries in the Kingdom (photo below).  I am also grateful to the UK Oracle User Group Chairman, Ronan Miles, who kindly travelled to Saudi to share his experiences with the Saudi User Group.  Now, that really is the essence of user groups -- sharing across communities.

Collaborative dialogue with the User groups has helped guide us in defining content and functionality in our releases, and of course, in improving our support.  Also, I was pleased to learn that, so far, our Oracle Academy program has been implemented in 27 educational institutions in the Kingdom and around 13,630 Saudi secondary and university-level students are being helped to develop their business and technology skills. 

Additionally, our annual EMEA Industry Analysts Summit took place in Dubai in April, a good interactive session which again helps us refine our offerings.

Then last month in Cairo, we held the inauguration ceremony for our new Global Support Services Centre in the Egypt Smart Village business park. Dr. Tarek Kamel, Egyptian Minister for Communication and Information Technology, kindly attended and unveiled the plaque (see photo).  Our Egyptian support center serves global customers and is staffed with multi-lingual highly skilled technology experts. 

During my visit, I was especially privileged to meet H.E Dr. Ahmed Nazeif, Prime Minister of Egypt.  Egypt's Smart Village Centre in Cairo is really impressive and a testament to the government's dedicated focus on high-tech development, and its commitment to implement leading-edge e-government solutions.  We have our Oracle Academy programs in Egypt, in partnership with the EEI (Egypt Education Initiative) which we hope will help build IT skills in the upcoming generations. 

In addition to the Egyptian Global Support Centre, we have the Oracle Middleware Centre of Excellence in Jordan and the Oracle Business Applications Centre of Excellence in Lebanon.

It's always a pleasure for me to visit our customers in the Middle East and I really enjoy the hospitality and the sheer enthusiasm and appetite for IT -- some of the most innovative customer projects come from this region.  I see these sort of activities where we are keeping in touch and keeping close to our communities -- listening to CIOs, talking with analysts, working with User Groups, helping customers --  as top of my agenda. And, of course, as an Italian, I love conversations! 

The Large Hadron Collider, CERN.

Last week I was privileged to be part of an event to celebrate 25 years of collaboration between Oracle and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.  And Oracle itself was privileged to have CERN's CIO Wolfgang von Ruden, and the European Commission's Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, Mario Campolargo, speak at our event.

CERN, the world's largest particle physics centre, is located near Geneva. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. CERN physicists are studying what happens when the smallest known particles -- the fundamental building blocks of all things -- collide, to learn more about the laws of Nature.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC),a gigantic particle accelerator about 100 m underground, will revolutionise our understanding, from the miniscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe. Check out this animation which explains what the LHC is, how it works and how the data it produces will be processed and analysed by scientists around the world. It's very impressive.

I get a kick every time I visit CERN -- and I've been lucky to visit many times -- particularly as it is the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It was here in 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee conceived the idea of the web so it has particular relevance for Oracle, as we were one of the first companies to make its business applications available through the Internet.  Therefore, it was with great pride that we held a joint event to mark our 25 years of collaboration.

Possibly the greatest thing we have in common with CERN is innovation. At Oracle we have been innovating for over 30 years, and we have 16,000 engineers in over 20 countries focused on building innovative solutions, and today all our innovation is customer-driven. 

In my opinion, research and development (R&D) models are shifting. They are moving away from the supply-side approach of big firms funding ambitious projects that create large barriers to entry, towards a demand-driven approach focused more on speed and need of customers. I speak to customers all the time who give input on what they need for their businesses, and we give that feedback to our developers.  

We don't innovate just in isolation, either. R&D is undertaken today less and less in an ivory tower, and more in partnerships between academia, industry and governments. A collaborative approach is crucial to successful innovation to encourage the intersection of ideas in a multidisciplinary environment. Research topics are exploring areas where the impact on economy and society can be maximized to deliver the most return on investment. 

R&D is not cheap.  Funds for pure R&D are reducing, and increasingly organizations need to justify the investment at any level via commercialisation of innovation. Therefore collaboration makes both intellectual and commercial sense.

And the use of information technologies, such as grid computing which CERN utilises, can accelerate the innovation process.  CERN uses Oracle technologies such as Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and Oracle Streams is a core part of the LHC infrastructure enabling CERN to replicate data to 11 global sites, from Taiwan to Oxford, Bologna to New York. This project has seen CERN push Oracle Streams to the limits of its throughput capability.

At Oracle, we have collaborative innovation programs with our Partners such as Nokia, Intel and Siemens, and with many academic institutions and research centres across EMEA.   In 2004, we created the Oracle Innovation Award Program for partners and in the last three and a half years, over 400 partners have participated from 39 different countries. 

I firmly believe that Europe has massive creative and innovative potential and we have Oracle Competency Centres in cities such as Dublin, Warsaw, Istanbul, and Malaga where continuous innovation brings huge benefits for our customers in telecommunications, consultancy, and many other areas.

Additionally, we are accelerating our innovation to more rapidly meet customer demand.  By its very nature, R&D and innovation must be far-sighted in its objectives as it is planning for the future. It needs to anticipate what we will all be using in five or ten or fifteen years' time.  And it needs the best tools -- that's where IT can help. 

We're constantly looking to bring the latest technologies to our customers, to help them plan the future success of their organisations.  And working with prestigious institutions such CERN as a very small part of their enormously important project is one of the more exciting parts of my job. 

Recently, I attended our Partner Advisory Board and met with some of the best advocates of Oracle's products. The Board is an open forum where we meet to personally update our Partners on Oracle's strategy and product suites, and to hear from them about how we can address any issues in their marketplaces. I find the interaction invaluable, as any true partnership has to be a two-way dialogue. Hearing direct feedback from the people who are ostensibly part of our extended sales force, and who serve thousands of our customers, helps us to be a better partner. 

Using input from Partners via the Advisory Board, and through continuous monitoring and analysis of partner opinion, we identify opportunities for improvement in many areas such as increasing levels of support; developing new programs for partners through the Oracle PartnerNetwork, and helping our partners succeed in making their customers fully satisfied.

In EMEA, partners are particularly important to our success.  We are present in 57 countries in the region, and our local partners have a key role in taking Oracle solutions and services to a broad customer base. I believe that local knowledge, local expertise, and trusted experts who have developed local solutions that meet local market needs is the route to mutual success.

A few years ago, I established the Partnering Excellence program in EMEA as part of the core values of every one of our employees. We have a steering committee of senior executives from both our Alliances and Channels units and from other business divisions who all contribute to driving the best tools and programs for our partners.  We recognize excellence in our Partners through the Oracle EMEA Partner Innovation Awards, and we have many programs that add value to our partners -- extensive training programs through our Competency Center; marketing tools; developer toolkits; migration centers; our Open Market Model to support partners in sales engagement; quick-start entry level programs for new partners to get up and running quickly; a Partner Interaction Center that offers support in 20 languages; a Solutions Catalogue giving our partners visibility to over 10 million viewers, and much more.

Core to our outreach to local partners in the region are our strategic high-touch networking events -- Oracle PartnerNetwork Days -- where thousands of Partners meet our experts, attend education sessions, network with each other, and learn how to make the most of their partnership with Oracle. And the new Oracle PartnerNetwork Networking Portal allows partners to independently engage directly with each other and work to together on joint business opportunities. Today we have over 11,000 partners in EMEA and 9 new partners join every working day.  I am extremely pleased with our progress, but we are keen to do more to further support our strong OPN partnerbase

For instance, the small-to-medium sized business market is a huge opportunity in this region, but it is historically a difficult market to address.  To help our partners get started we have created two marketing e-books -- one technology and one applications -- which give our partners everything they need to know about breaking into this market.  And we also have Sales Centres in Europe that help identify potential new customers in the SMB area and connect them directly to our partners. Our latest SMB offering is Oracle Accelerate which helps out partners deliver low-cost, low-risk, and industry-specific application solutions to SMB customers quickly and cost-efficiently.

Many of these ideas, programs, products, and improvements have come out of our two-way dialogue with our partners through the Advisory Board and through ground-level feedback. They tell us what they need, and we work to make that happen.  We welcome and value our partners' opinions as it ultimately helps us all make our customers happier.

One of the most interesting countries that I visit regularly is the Republic of South Africa, and each time I go there I'm amazed by the progress and the opportunity! The economy is developing well with the annual growth rate in real GDP at market prices for 2006 at 5 percent. South Africa has multiple cultures and 11 official languages. English is the business language and literacy rates are estimated at 86 percent. With respect to IT, many areas such as the public sector, the communications, content, commerce and manufacturing industries, and the SMB sector are installing IT systems to help achieve future growth and profitability, and to realise the government's objective to become a successful regional and global player.

As with many developing countries, however, IT skills remain a challenge, and this is where private enterprise can help. The South African government has embarked on a Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment program designed to assist previously disadvantaged populations. As part of our contribution to BBBEE, we are proud members of the government's ICT Forum, which supports growth in the ICT sector and encourages direct dialogue with President Thabo Mbeki.

Our South African management team has initiated many programs to develop IT skills including training for customers and partners; a successful IT graduate program; and various social investment initiatives such as the e-Schools project in collaboration with our partners, and supporting the RAU Oracle Saturday School project for developing maths skills in Soweto's secondary schools.

Possibly the greatest contribution of which I am very proud is the school that we have built from scratch. In 2000, I had the privilege of meeting President Mbeki to discuss how Oracle could further help the South African education system. Last month, after many years of planning in liaison with the Gauteng Department of Education, securing the funds, reviewing the construction plans, and laying the foundation stone, we officially opened the Ponelopele Oracle Secondary School in Midrand, near Johannesburg.

The school has 1,300 learners and 38 staff. It's the only secondary school in the area and has 24 classrooms, science lab, library, cookery and needlework rooms, two dedicated computer rooms and a school hall with a stage. It's close to Oracle's South African offices so our employees can remain directly involved with the school.

Education is one of the key elements of Oracle Commitment and our corporate citizenship efforts. Together Oracle and the Oracle Education Foundation, an independent, philanthropic organization funded by Oracle, offer several innovative educational programs that provide students with 21^st century technology skills and knowledge.  In EMEA, I see our role in promoting education through technology as a high priority, and so I'm always pleased when we launch new projects.

This month, the Oracle Education Foundation (OEF) launched Think.com, a secure, protected online environment, to primary school students in Turkey.  Think.com allows students to use the Internet to advance their education through projects, solvng problems and connecting them with other Think.com students around the world.  The Turkish Think.com project will initially include 20 schools with 1,684 students and teachers participating.  So far, Oracle and OEF have trained a total of 22 lead teachers to guide and manage the students'  online participation. Over the last year we have introduced Think.com to Spain, Austria, Belgium, France, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Mali, Qatar, and Romania. 

Across Europe, we have a group of children who have been learning about the socio-cultural, climatic, and geographical aspects of their own country and identifying the cultural similarities and differences with other European countries.  The 250 children, aged between 4 and 16 years from 9 European countries -- France, Italy, Romania, Austria, Spain, Finland, Poland, Greecy, and Germany -- have been collaborating together in this 3-year project that began in 2006.

Also, this month in partnership with Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE), Oracle is rewarding students who have created the most innovative company website platforms, as part of a student European Trade Fair.  The competition for the best business website is part of JA-YE's European Challenge, a series of technology-based learning activities to teach students entrepreneurship and business skills.  Launching the competition in partnership with JA-YE, Oracle aims to raise awareness among students of the fundamental role technology plays in business, and to recognise and celebrate young talent. 

We also have educational programs for senior school students.  This year, we've introduced the Oracle Academy: Introduction to Computer Business, which helps students develop IT sScience & kills in Montenegro and Serbia. The Oracle Academy prepares students for 21^st century careers and provides teachers with world-class training and professional development opportunities.

In Romania the Oracle Internship gives post-graduates the opportunity to gain work experience in a multi-national IT environment.  This gives them true hands-on experience, plus a global company name on their CV.  Further, we're sponsoring five gifted Romanian students to complete PhD research projects into Grid computing.  Also in Romania, we're involved in halting the brain drain with the "brain regain" program that matches bright, talented students with attractive positions with local employers. 

Mentoring is all part of educating the next generation. In France, 13 Oracle managers are acting as mentors in the Nos Quartiers Out Des Talents association to coach young underprivileged graduates in developing job interview skills to get into employment.  More than anything, being able to represent yourself competently in a job interview is key in getting your first step on the work ladder.

It's exciting to help tomorrow's citizens use IT to learn, to become part of the global community, and to make it part of their skill-base. In our last fiscal year, in 51 countries in the EMEA region over 303,000 students were touched by Oracle and OEF's education initiatives.

Through these education programs, we help students from elementary schools all the way through to post-graduation to use IT to gain knowledge, to develop marketable skills for the workplace, to experience work hands-on, and most importantly, to pass that first job interview.

A large part of my job is helping Oracle customers in the EMEA region get the best value from their IT systems -- it's great when we get the right solution to move a customer's business goals forward.

However, there is another part that shares equal importance and which gives me a great deal of pleasure and fulfilment.  As a responsible member of the communities in which we work we have a commitment to do the best we can to help those communities prosper.  This program is called Oracle's Commitment as we seek to make positive, meaningful change to the societies in which we live through education, volunteerism, donations, and care for our environment.

I get a great kick out of seeing the energy and enthusiasm that our folks put into our volunteerism projects.  There are almost too many to mention, but here are a few highlights.

In Poland, we help the Great Orchestra Charity run its online auctions which help fund public hospitals, and our teams have raised money for the Association of Blind People; in Germany, orphans at the German Red Cross Centre in Potsdam received computers, monitors and printers for their newly renovated computer room; and in Israel, staff are helping immigrant children from Ethiopia have fun learning arts and crafts.

In Turkey Oracle employees raised money to donate two kidney machines to hospitals dealing with earthquake victims; Moscow staff have helped run events and donated prizes for children with special needs; and in the Czech Republic Oracle donated the first ambulance to a paediatric doctors' unit.  Oracle Belgium staff have been selling flowers on the streets of Brussels to raise money for cancer research.

And we're not shy about rolling up our sleeves and getting stuck in! Our renovating handymen have spruced up stables for the disabled both in Fot in Hungary, and in Sonning, UK.  A Leonard Cheshire home for elderly disabled people has been redecorated by our UK do-it-yourselfers, and in Sofia Oracle Bulgaria staff have cleaned up a special needs children's home, added a new staircase and given all the children gifts.  The Tetis Children's Rehabilitation Centre in Slovakia got our spruce-up treatment, plus we upgraded the IT network.  Oracle Dubai office assisted Teens 4 Positive Action Organization in creating mural paintings in the Senses Centre for Children with Special Needs.

Sometimes kids need a break.  Under-privileged children in Czech Republic have received Christmas gifts from Oracle, and we've arranged for them to have residential visits to families in Prague to experience a typical family environment. Similarly, our Cape Town South Africa team took disabled and less fortunate children from the Nazareth House on a fun filled outing to a bird sanctuary and a beach visit.

We're not forgetting the animals and the environment.  In Prague, Oracle Czech employees have been helping clean up Prague Zoo after the disastrous floods by clearing away piles of rubbish.  In the Slovak Republic Oracle staff together with local children helped preserve the habitat of non-migrant birds in Bratislava's inner city Horsky Park by building bird boxes, and providing feed. Oracle Ireland employees have been helping conserve Ireland's natural heritage and biodiversity by cleaning out the riverbank in the Tolka Valley to allow native species to flourish. And every year our Muscovite employees are proud to take part in the annual city clean-up. 

For the more energetic employees, community work offers great scope for exercise. Our more athletic staff members are working out to aid many projects; in the UK staff cycled 70 miles to raise money for Romanian orphanages, and in the Netherlands our Dutch staff are running in the Run to Do Right sports program to help underprivileged children.  In France, 16 Oracle staff members took part if the 750 km Course de Couer run linking Paris with Courchevel in the Alps, an event covering four days and four nights on foot, bicycle and even rollerskates, to help raise awareness of the need for organs for transplants.  Amazing physical effort; well done to everyone. 

For me, it's great to see our people giving their time, money and energy to help those less fortunate than themselves.   Time, money, energy -- and blood! From Athens to Zagreb Oracle staff are committed blood donors.  Our community work continues and you can find out more on our website www.oracle.eu.

It is always nice to complete a good year, and Fiscal 2006 has been very good in the EMEA region. By 31 May 2006, our total revenues increased 10 percent year-on-year to $4.7 billion, and applications revenues grew by more than 100 percent in the second half of the year.   

What's really pleasing about these results is that it means that more customers are choosing Oracle. It's great to get this endorsement from both commercial businesses and public organisations, and to see that our efforts to better serve our customers are bringing results.

Each customer has a specific objective in upgrading, or changing, or starting an IT implementation, and in EMEA, we keep a league table of the top reasons.

Overwhelmingly this year, centralisation (consolidation, integration) comes out as the No. 1 EMEA customer objective. It's understandable.  Years of proliferation of many unconnected databases mean a lot of companies have huge amounts of data... but limited useful information.  More and more, I see organisations wanting to 'bring it all together'.  Maybe it's several accounting systems that need to be consolidated, or customer data that's dispersed throughout a series of departments, or citizen records held in multiple authorities.  

Whatever the purpose, together with our partners and our own services organization, we can help our customers to get better information (objective No. 2.)  With our Oracle Fusion Architecture, based on open standards, we help customers bring their data together and gain true business intelligence.

No. 3 in our EMEA league is efficiencies, which goes hand-in-hand with lowered cost of ownership (No. 4). Consolidation of server capacity using grid technologies is a big cost saver. In EMEA, we have been measuring the uptake of Grid Computing for two years, and the fourth report on Oracle Grid Index, which surveyed 1,466 companies globally, shows us that this technology is now moving out of the early adopter phase into the 'maturing technology' phase. 

The most grid-advanced region is the Nordic countries who lead the world with the overall top score of 6.4 (out of a possible 10).  Both Germany and the U.S. come in at 6.1.  So I'm proud that European organisations are the global leaders in making use of the latest cost-saving technologies. Oracle launched the first commercially-available grid-enabled database, Oracle Database10g, in 2003 and we now have a group of customers who collectively achieved on average 150 percent ROI with a 43 percent internal rate of return.  You can quick-test your own Grid Index, and get a copy of the full report. 

As part of our fourth Grid Index, we also surveyed awareness of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).  Currently, 76 percent of IT experts are aware of it, and 9 percent of respondents have some sort of implementation.  But overall, it's early days, and many business people in Europe are not yet completely clear on what SOA can do for their businesses. 

Now, that's our job for the coming year, to educate our EMEA customers on the value of SOA.

When we think about innovation for a hi-tech company like Oracle, we tend to focus on Research & Development. This dimension is, of course, critical; and our company continues to develop and bring to market innovative products. In addition, however, we have found over the years that our customers, partners and field employees often discover ways of utilizing and extending our core products to solve critical business issues that R&D doesn't necessarily foresee: for a company like ours, it is critical to leverage this broad community in a consistent and coordinated manner.

Our development groups work regularly with our key customers to improve our products and run a number of customer advisory boards to help set priorities for future functionality.

Four years ago in EMEA we started a Field Innovation network to encourage our employees to bring forward to our management team innovations that they have done in process improvement, in product implementation, and in new solutions. Every quarter we select the best innovations, we recognize them, and we work to replicate them across multiple countries; many of these innovations have been incorporated in our products or have become global processes.

More recently we also identified the opportunity to better leverage our extensive network of partners (we have more then 9,000 in EMEA), to identify their innovation, select the best, recognize them, and support the winning partners in deploying their solution.

As part of our EMEA Partner Awards Program, we introduced the OPN Innovation Award in 2004. I encourage our partners to take advantage of this opportunity and to submit their innovation -- here is the URL: oracle.com/partners/home/news/emea/english/events/awards/announcement.html.

With over 14,000 Oracle employees working across the region we are in contact with over 60,000 customers and 9,000 partners, and we gather an incredible amount of ideas; our challenge is to make sure we continuously learn on how to improve our products, services, and solutions.

We are not the only one with this challenge: innovation is on the top of the agenda for most companies and governments. The existing technological platforms enable collaboration across country boundaries and can help stimulate and disseminate innovation in all fields. Innovation is global. Let me give you one example of this: the first-ever World Innovation Summit was held in Muscat, Oman, bringing together speakers from all over the world, and Oman has created a Knowledge Oasis in Muscat to stimulate innovation in that country. Go and check www.wsie.org and www.kom.om. You will be amazed!

I have recently returned from a business trip to Jordan, and I would like to share my experiences, describe what we are doing there, and encourage other people in the IT industry to consider the opportunity.

This was my third trip over two years.  I first went there in 2004 with the World Economic Forum and had the opportunity to see at first hand the progress made by the Kingdom of Jordan in developing an open society, with a substantial focus on knowledge-based industries. This is not new: Jordan has a long tradition in developing IT skills and has excellent technical universities, and this focus has been accelerating over the last few years.

We established our first customers in Jordan in 1984, and we have trained thousands of people on the Oracle database over the years. Actually, Jordan is probably the country with the highest percentage of Oracle Certified Professionals in relation to the number of IT professionals. Many of these people are working abroad, in the USA, in the Gulf States, and so on. We also have a number of partners, both in technology as well as in Oracle Applications.

Since we were looking to establish a new Regional Technical Center focused on middleware and on new emerging technologies such as RFID and Wireless, we considered a number of locations, and we finally selected Amman, Jordan, for this center.

One year after the official opening, we now employ nearly 40 people, of which 30 are young graduates in IT with a good percentage of women  who come from the best technical universities in Jordan. The team is up and running, very motivated, and is already contributing to our business development and to the support of our customers, not only in the region, but also in Europe. We are very happy with the quality of the skills, and we plan to further expand the center.

Additionally, we have established partnerships with local companies and with the Government to help provide postgraduate education to the best students, both in technology as well as in business skills, in order to create the capacity required for this growing market.

We have received good support from His Majesty, King Abdullah II and the Government, and setting up the office went relatively smoothly.

By the way, Jordan is a beautiful country, and it holds the ruins of Petra, one of the most spectacular sites of the ancient civilization (see http://nabataea.net/petra.html).