Expert Overview
Matt Vitullo is a Sales Engineer at Oracle who brings product and industry expertise to every interaction we have with prospective customers, including discovery calls, solution designs, and product demonstrations. Matt works closely with the teams supporting our Permitting and Licensing product to help design features, prioritize product enhancements, and provide industry and customer perspectives.
Matt joined Oracle from a competitive vendor in the permitting and licensing industry where he worked in sales engineering, customer success, and professional services. Prior to that, he spent five years working as a GIS specialist for his home state of New Jersey. When not hard at work, Matt enjoys travel, board games, creative arts, and baseball.
Q: How did your degree in Ecology and Natural Resource Management, and your background in GIS, prepare you for the work you do today?
A: Studying ecosystems and how humans rely upon and influence the natural world helped me understand that we all live in communities at different scales; we are dependent on each other for survival and quality of life – locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. The global community has a responsibility to preserve the health of the planet that gives us shelter and sustenance, and similarly, local communities must work together to ensure the health and prosperity of their constituents. This perspective has helped me understand the missions and goals of the public service professionals I work with and helps me see the greater purpose and value of serving the public through technology modernization.
Having a GIS background gives me insights into specific technical aspects of Land Management that our customers are often concerned about. This experience is also helpful when working with product development and implementation teams. Mostly though, it’s a fun outlet for a serious map geek!
Q: What made you decide to join the Oracle team?
A: When I was first approached to consider joining Oracle, I was reluctant to depart my previous employer, as I had built a strong loyalty to the many wonderful colleagues and customers I worked with there. As I learned more about Oracle’s plans to build a new solution on the latest cloud technology, my reluctance began to give way to curiosity. The idea that a large, established company intended to enter a market dominated by smaller vendors and older technology, and that I had an opportunity to assist in that effort at a very early stage, was ultimately too good to pass up.
Q: How does Oracle Permitting and Licensing differentiate itself in the market of software products?
A: The most important differentiator, in my mind, is that Oracle offers a complete suite of SaaS solutions on a unified platform. Being able to offer front and back-office solutions that are all built from scratch to work together, be upgraded together (automatically every quarter), and be hosted in Oracle data centers with world-class security is unique. The next key differentiator is that Oracle Permitting and Licensing is built and implemented by experts with a wide range and long history of experience in Land Management software. Oracle’s product and delivery teams bring best practices and lessons learned from working with a wide variety of agencies, products, vendors, and regions. Oracle’s customers are the ultimate beneficiaries of this cumulative experience.
Q: What do you enjoy most about working directly with customers?
A: In my position as a Sales Engineer, when working directly with customers, I am either listening to understand their goals and perspective, or I am doing the walk-and-talk of software demonstrations. I find both modes very appealing and I love to facilitate mutual understanding. We often present to audiences with a variety of roles and technical expertise; CIOs, CFOs, inspectors, technicians, planners, and more, can all be in the same room, trying to see value in a singular presentation or demo. I find it very rewarding to find a way to speak to the entire room. When the audience is engaged and interested, and all their varied perspectives and expectations have been understood and met, I feel like I’ve helped them get closer to their goals to strengthen their communities.
Q: And to end our conversation on a fun note: tell us about your recent accomplishment as a baseball fan…
A: Sometime in 2014, as I started to travel around the country meeting customers, taking every opportunity to visit the local ballpark, I decided I wanted to visit all 30 MLB stadiums. Over the next six years I made steady progress toward my goal, sometimes visiting a new city over a weekend, sometimes building a ballgame into a business trip. The pandemic put a pause on my efforts and I resumed once things began to open up again in 2021. Last summer I visited the last six on the list! People always ask which is my favorite, and my answer is always Oracle Park in San Francisco (even before the change in naming rights!), despite being a life-long fan of the New York Yankees.
Learn More
Modern cloud technology solutions can help public-sector organizations overcome many of the challenges they face. By migrating to the cloud with Oracle Permitting and Licensing, organizations can embrace innovation and push the limits of what their employees and constituents have come to expect from their government. Oracle is excited to be able to partner with government organizations on their journey to the cloud, and you can discover more Permitting and Licensing product here.