Williams: Yes, particularly in the manufacturing beat. The manufacturing sector, the supply chain, Taiwan shows great leadership through (David Lee, managing director of Oracle Taiwan Inc) and his team here in the implementation in those sort of systems on the mainland in China. Great leadership.
TT: Do you shift a lot of your Taiwanese employees over to China?
Williams: Yes, there is a certain number of people who do that and there will probably be more in the future. We also have a business in Taiwan which is keeping us pretty busy as well. There are over 250 users of our applications software here in Taiwan. So we are really the market leader in applications. Probably in most countries in the world, SAP would be the market leader and we would be No. 2, but here in Taiwan, I think we could categorically say we are No. 1.
TT: In Taiwan companies are very conservative on upgrading to new technology. How do you overcome that and what are Oracle's top selling products in Taiwan and Greater China?
Williams: I think the big advantage that small and medium-sized enterprises here in Taiwan have is the ability to work across borders, both in terms of in Hong Kong and what is offered there, and in particular in mainland China. So maybe the advantage here is that you can bring automation in to the 1,037,000 small and medium-sized enterprises here in Taiwan. But because of the growth opportunities associated with China, you could be faced with not having to lay any people off because you have that growth. I think the issue comes when you don't have growth and you bring in automation, that can replace people. But if you have growth, you can bring in automation and you do not have to replace people. That's a fundamental difference.
TT: Is it easy to convince companies here of that?
Williams: I think all of the companies here that I would put in the category of being visionary and you don't have to be a big company or a small company to be a visionary, you have to be a leader. There will be a leader in all segments. They already see it, they get it, and what happens is that by their leadership in the respective industry they're in, they'll pull through the rest of the organizations in their particular industry. That's what I see tends to happen right across the world.
TT: Is there any different selling strategy you would use in China or Taiwan versus the US or the UK?
Williams: Well, I guess its all about maturity of markets and the market coverage that you have. I mean, if you take the UK or the US, clearly these are markets Oracle has been operating in for -- well as far as the US is concerned since 1978 and the UK since the early 80s. What is does mean there is that you have a maturity of market and a maturity of customer. You also have market coverage which is pretty well sorted out in terms of what's the best way to cover the market. The difference in many of our developing countries in the Asia-Pacific, is that we're still in the early stages of market coverage. I mean if you just take the sheer size of China, for example. We have still only limited market coverage, either the geography, or through industries, or just the sheer size of the number of organizations. It's early days, and therefore the only differences I guess with what we use is we might be using a market coverage model in a developing country whereas we might be using a much more developed way of doing to business in a country which is fully developed.
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