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Oracle Australia boss leaves

update Oracle Australia managing director Leigh Warren has resigned his post due to personal reasons, according to a statement from the company.Oracle said this morning 12-year company veteran Ian White would take on the role from 1 July.
Written by Iain Ferguson, Contributor
update Oracle Australia managing director Leigh Warren has resigned his post due to personal reasons, according to a statement from the company.

Oracle said this morning 12-year company veteran Ian White would take on the role from 1 July.

White most recently held the post of general manager, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.

The new appointee's role will be to "help government and business better understand the significant opportunities presented by Oracle's innovation in grid computing and to assert the company's leadership in applications," the company said.

White is to report to Keith Budge, senior vice president at Oracle Asia-Pacific. His appointment comes just days before the company's president, Charles Phillips and John Wookey, senior vice-president, application development, arrive in Australia for a visit during which they plan to update the market on applications vision and strategy, acquisition activity and the latest developments in Project Fusion, which aims to deliver a merged suite of PeopleSoft and Oracle products.

White is understood to have played a key role in the recent securing of an AU$66.8 million, 10-year contract to help deliver the Western Australian government's shared corporate services project, in which more than 100 government agencies are expected to consolidate their back-office functions into three shared service centres.

Budge said Warren would be "greatly missed" for his contribution to the company and building of its customer and partner relationships.

White told ZDNet Australia   late this morning his appointment had been announced internally a couple of days ago while Warren's resignation had been going through internal company processes for a few weeks.

He declined to comment in detail on financials or local staff numbers, saying the company was in a quiet period ahead of the release of its earnings to the market on 29 June.

However, he said the legal formalities associated with the PeopleSoft acquisition in Australia and New Zealand had been finalised by 1 June, complementing completion of the office co-location and staff integration programs.

The new managing director said the company had "done a pretty effective job to date" in educating customers about the potential offered by grid computing, saying there were "hundreds" of public and private sector organisations Australia-wide either prototyping or in production of grid computing-style architectures.

His aims also included building Oracle Australia's competitive strengths in middleware and the application business. White pointed to the Oracle Fusion for SAP program -- released yesterday in the local market -- as an example of its determination to compete with its key rival, which has aggressively moved internationally to win customers uncertain as to the future of PeopleSoft products under the new regime. Under the so-called OFF SAP program, Oracle is offering those SAP R/3 customers facing re-licensing or re-implementation of their applications to upgrade to MySAP ERP or MySAP Business Suite licence credits of up to 100 percent to shift to Oracle's E-Business suite.

White also nominated as a key task the restructuring of customer advisory boards along industry verticals, a process he said would strengthen customers' ability to deliver relevant feedback to the way the company goes about its business.

Gartner principal analyst Dean McGahan told ZDNet Australia  the new local managing director was "well-respected" and had won a lot of kudos within the organisation for securing the Western Australian deal.

This is the second high-profile departure in recent weeks for Oracle in Asia-Pacific. On June 14, the president of its Korean operations, Kim Il-ho, also resigned due to personal reasons.

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