Vance Kearney, VP HR at Oracle EMEA, is regularly named as one of the HR world’s thought leaders, and after 18 years at Oracle, he’s still in the thick of it.

You’ve been quoted as saying people are the differentiator between organisations. Can you explain your thoughts?

I’ve approached this a few times over last two years, and I’ve always said that people are our most important asset, because of what they do and what they say, how they manage and how they lead.
We have seen significant changes in the last twenty years at Oracle, through hardware to software, through a focus on marketing and branding, to the creation of the Net and its implications on the way businesses are run, whether they’re the banks, retailers, car companies or software companies.

Given that continual change of landscape, the key differentiator between whichever of those companies you look at, is their ability to execute. And the largest part of that comes down to leadership and good management. That defines whether you’re a market leader or not, together with effective execution of a corporate strategy. If you look at retailers, you’d probably say Tesco, as Britain’s biggest retailer, appears to have been the most successful in its strategy execution, though clearly both Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer have improved their performance recently. What’s the key driver? Leadership.

Oracle has been very fortunate to have had similarly strong leadership over the years, from Larry Ellison and the rest of the executive team. We are the world’s largest enterprise software company, and if you have the right strategy and the best technology, it will show up in your results. Last year, our annual revenue increased $3.6 billion to $18 billion, and our operating income increased $1.2 billion to $6 billion. Over the last five years, we have achieved our goals through execution of a very clear, globalised strategy that combines innovation with acquisitions and in that, HR has had and will continue to have a huge impact.

Is there any prospect of Oracle’s acquisition rate slowing down?

We’ve made 42 acquisitions in the last two years, with 25 of them in Europe. There have been some big acquisitions, but a lot of smaller ones too, though the smaller ones tend to get less attention. The pace of Oracle is relentless and all consuming. Everyone is doing more with less people – more efficiency, more performance, and more productivity. We’ll always want to find the best people because that’s the nature of our industry.

I think our challenge now is how to continue all this activity. Over the last five years, our rate of acquisition transactions and the actual number of people hired and managed has been extraordinary. The challenge for HR is to have the time to achieve that. So we automate and eliminate any HR activities we consider to be low value-add and adopt those that will make a difference to the business. We are very well disciplined.

When Oracle is in the process of acquiring another company, does it try to integrate that company’s culture?

The largest acquisition that we’ve made is in scale less than a tenth the size of Oracle. So it is clear which company’s culture is going to be dominant, though having said that, each of the companies Oracle acquires brings a valuable set of skills and capabilities that we didn’t have before. But it is not at all a question of merging cultures.

How does HR within Oracle go about attracting and retaining new talent?

Everyone with HR efficiently does their job. A big part is working with the senior management to unlock new and emerging top talent that we are developing ourselves, or that we’re gaining through the acquisitions we make. We’re going out and recruiting new skills as the business develops, and gaining new products and new capabilities that ensure we have the breadth and depth of the skills we need.

Does Oracle’s HR team have a system (or structure) for managing the people it has acquired?

Oracle’s HR does not manage people. Managers do that. What HR produces are the tools and processes that enable managers to do a very good job of it. We have recently introduced ‘buddy systems’ for new employees to be able to team up with Oracle employees. And there are plenty of Oracle employees to go around: there must be 15 Oracle employees for every new Oracle employee. We do have to be careful with smaller acquisitions that we don’t swamp them with our processes. And sometimes, we are so focused on the work we’re doing that the relative number of people working on an acquisition is greater than the number of people being acquired!

Does Oracle need to acquire companies to maintain its pace of innovation? Or does innovation come from smaller players?

In the early 1990s, we were a single product, relational database business. Now, we have easily 200 plus products covering databases, middleware, business intelligence, business and industry applications. We are selling to many different markets, and there are many more players than in 1991. In EMEA, we used to operate in 20 countries. Now we operate in over 60 countries.

But to compete, you have to be a large company. We are already seeing a consolidation of the industry. Yes, there will always be small niche companies providing specific skills and capabilities, but the market will be dominated by a few larger software companies. Technology innovation will come from big companies like us, IBM and SAP, as well as from small companies. The smaller ones that have a significant impact are likely to find themselves becoming more attractive to the larger ones.

Do the employees you acquire really believe in the benefits that can arise from working for an organisation of Oracle’s size? Or are they concerned that the way they work may change after the acquisition?

Making an acquisition offers the potential to channel any duplication into hard savings through economies of scale, and that also includes HR. The smart people we acquire do see that there are 60,000 opportunities that we have here within Oracle. Some of the people who are coming from small companies will still be people who like to work in a small organisation, very flexibly, and very entrepreneurially. Others will see the opportunity we offer and grasp it.

Looking at careers, are the skills needed to be a successful HR leader transferable from one industry to another?

Yes. HR skills are transferable, and you can go from one industry to another. I did. People are people. There will be times when to be considered for some roles, it would be preferable if you had knowledge of working in a particular industry, and that includes the IT industry, which has seen a number of changes, going from being hardware-based to software-driven, and now Web-dependent. Gaining and building talent is the same in any industry; the challenges are very similar.

The way you build a great career is having a strong focus. Get experience of as many aspects of HR as you can: recruitment and retention, policy development, learning and development, compensation and industrial relations.

The alternative is to develop a specialism. You could, for example, spend 10-15 years doing recruitment, and recruiters do make very good HR people through their skills in finding the talent and understanding their clients’ needs. As I said before, it is people that make companies.

Vance Kearney, VP HR at Oracle EMEA, is regularly named as one of the HR world’s thought leaders, and after 18 years at Oracle, he’s still in the thick of it.

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