Oracle is hiring 1,400 sales staff to drive cloud growth

Oracle is recruiting a 1,400-strong sales force to push cloud products across its EMEA region.

Of the total number of staff, 450 will be based in a new cloud sales centre in Dublin, joining Oracle’s current 1,400 employees in the city, with the others spread across sites in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Malaga, and Prague.

Dermot O’Kelly, senior VP for Oracle UK, told Cloud Pro the Dublin centre will boast a social media hub, among other features, through which sales reps can engage with customers.

He added: “We’re really ambitious, we’re making no secret of the goal to become number one in the cloud globally, and we want to attract people who can match our ambition.”

However, he did not confirm when the new cloud sales force would be fully trained and ready to work, nor how long the recruitment process would take.

As well as pushing Oracle’s 600 cloud products to customers, O’Kelly said the sales team would be tasked with working with customers to see how cloud can fit into their IT strategies.

Staff will also target existing customers and new prospects, he confirmed.

“Cloud allows us to bring new solutions to existing customers but if you think about it, it opens up new markets to us as well,” O’Kelly said, saying smaller firms put off by Oracle’s on-premise prices could adopt cloud solutions that scale to their needs.

Oracle wants to earn $1.5 billion this financial year from cloud, and claims to have attracted nearly 1,500 SaaS customers and 2,100 PaaS customers over the past six months.

Though its ERP cloud has grown impressively and it earned $649 million from cloud in its latest financial quarter, some analysts have doubted whether the firm’s cloud can grow fast enough to replace falling on-premise sales.

Reports last year claimed that Oracle sales reps have used aggressive tactics to convince customers to move to the cloud, through methods like tough software audits.

But O’Kelly insisted Oracle wants companies to move at their own pace to the cloud.

He told Cloud Pro: “It would be wrong to force a company to do something that’s against their will.

“We want to have a robust conversation and be challenging to our customers and say ‘if not, why not?’, because we think there’s advantages [to the cloud]. But also we understand a lot of our customers have legacy applications and you might find the business case doesn’t stack up.”

Instead, the company has a “branch of cloud architects” who can talk about customers’ cloud journeys with them.