Q: Oracle has always been a giant software vendor and not only, seeming like it did a promise to its customers: whatever our competition does, we do it better. In this respect, how was 2017 for your company and what are your expectations for 2018?
Victor Maghiari: In the recent years Oracle strives to be the fastest growing scaled cloud company in the world. When looking at this in numbers, we can point out that Oracle generated non-GAAP $4.7B in cloud revenue in FY17, total cloud revenue was up 51 percent in FY18 Q1 to $1.5 billion. Oracle Cloud delivers over 1,000 SaaS applications and 50 enterprise-class PaaS and IaaS services to customers around the world, supporting 60+ billion transactions each day. Oracle has more than 28,000 PaaS and IaaS customers across 50+ services, 5,000 Fusion ERP customers, plus 12,000 NetSuite ERP customers in the Oracle Cloud. That’s 30 times more ERP customers than Workday.
Q: Oracle CEO has recently made a prediction: by 2025, 80% of the companies’ IT budgets are going to be invested in cloud services, while 80% of the productivity applications are going to rely on cloud. How does the picture look now in Romania in terms of cloud services?
Victor Maghiari: Romania is a country fully connected to the world tendencies. We have one of the fastest Internet connections in the world and we have very talented IT professionals and business people. The business agility and the request for around the clock availability become more and more a must.
Companies understood that cloud is not only the most reliable, affordable, modern and efficient way to make their business, but also the next generation business direction and therefore Cloud adoption is on the high speed.
Q: What can you tell us about Oracle’s new Cloud Database that uses machine learning to enable automation and eliminates human labor, human error and manual tuning? Should your competitors ‘’lose sleep’?
Victor Maghiari: It’s a revolutionary innovation. We’ve introduced the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud, the world’s first 100 percent self-driving autonomous database.
With total automation based on machine learning, Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud eliminates the human labor required to manage a database by enabling a database to automatically upgrade, patch and tune itself while running. With no more scope for human error or requirements for human performance testing, Oracle is able to minimize costly planned and unplanned downtime to less than 30 minutes a year and guarantee 99.995 percent availability.
Q: Security threats are a rising issue in enterprise IT. There are always new attacks, a security breach can shake or even destroy a company. What is Oracle’s plan to do around this topic?
Victor Maghiari: Yes, IT threats are a key issue, existing approaches to security and management are no longer sufficient. It has been a key topic during the recent Oracle Open World conference where we announced the industry’s first cloud-based intelligent security and management suite. The new machine learning powered security capabilities will help enterprises forecast, reduce, detect, and resolve cybersecurity threats and assist in efforts to remediate application and infrastructure performance issues.
As Larry Ellison pointed out: “We have to reprioritize and re-think about how we defend our information. We need new systems. We need purpose-built machine learning that can be used by security and operations professionals, not data scientists. We need automated remediation that does not require human effort. And that’s what we’ve built with Oracle Management Cloud.”
Q: What kind of new features are going to be available within Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud, Oracle Chain Management Cloud and the new Oracle Customer Experience Cloud?
Victor Maghiari: Oracle recently announced new artificial intelligence-based apps for finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, commerce, customer service, marketing, and sales professionals.
The new Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps are built into the existing Oracle Cloud Applications to deliver the industry’s most powerful AI-based modern business applications.
The new Adaptive Intelligent Apps enable business users from across the organizations to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. These capabilities make the decision-making process simpler and more efficient for business professionals across the organization.
Q: Oracle is present on the market for many decades. What would you consider the most important criteria of choice for your customers during the years?
Victor Maghiari: Well, I think our customers appreciate the continuous innovation from Oracle. Oracle is investing in R&D more than 6 billion per year and we continue to innovate for our customers. At Oracle Open World 2017, Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, showcased game-changing new services and enhancements across the Oracle Cloud Platform. Providing customers a unique advantage, Oracle is the only cloud provider to deliver a complete cloud portfolio, spanning Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Data as a Service (DaaS). With deep product knowledge, integration, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) built into every layer of the stack, customers can speed innovation with unmatched choice, cost and performance.
Q: Arguably, in Romania, in 2017 we witnessed a work force crisis. How were you able to retain your employees and what are the criteria for selecting new ones, as long as the demand for new employees in IT companies leads by one third of the total jobs requested at job fairs?
Victor Maghiari: Gone are the days of enticing job-seekers with a good salary alone. People still want to be paid fairly, but they also want to work for a company that shares their values and has a reputation for putting its people first. A strong employer brand has become the ultimate recruitment tool. In this respect, we are doing very good, Oracle is continously placed on the top of the „Most wanted employer’s list” in Romania.
It is due to the strong training and development opportunites, available carrier path, a friendly company culture and many more. And this good reputation helps us a lot on the highly competitive market seeking for new talents.
Q: If you were to go back 20 years, what would be your statement on ‘’Romania - then and now’’?
Victor Maghiari: Well, 20 years ago I’ve considered Romania at a turning point. The energies of our people started to explode and the interest, willingness and eagerness toward the innovative technologies and global trends became visible in almost all the industries.
At that time, I’ve considered that I have to play a role in this effervescence and I’ve joined Oracle Corporation. I’m still excited about the perspectives, I’m still proud to be an active participant of this fantastic change!
