Oracle hopes to spur Asian tech dev t with $6.62M facility

ENTERPRISE software company Oracle Corp. hopes to jumpstart development of technology solutions in South Asia with the opening of a 6.62-million-dollar facility in Singapore, a top Asia Pacific executive told reporters Wednesday.
Working with the Singapore Economic Development Board, Oracle set up the Advance Technology and Solutions Center (ATSC) with 17 software engineers working on several technology projects in the region, starting with Singapore, said Derek Williams, executive vice president for Oracle Asia Pacific.

Williams said Oracle hopes to tap the “collective power of intellectual property” in the region by establishing technology development centers in Asia Pacific.

On July 2004, Oracle opened a major development center in China that was intended to focus on the booming Chinese market. A month earlier, the software company announced the establishment of its Linux Enterprise Applications Center with Red Hat in Singapore with the objective of tapping

market for solutions developed by independent software vendors in the region.

“It is essential that we have to generate revenues out of the innovations that we do. But we’re also doing this to experiment with newer technologies,” the executive added.

The ATSC is the first technology development center of Oracle in South Asia, according to Pascal Sero, head of the China development center and the ATSC.

At the moment, Sero said the ATSC intends to focus on the development of solutions around four key technology areas: enterprise grid computing, sensor-based technology such as radio frequency identification (RFID), security and collaborative computing.

While most ATSC projects are now being done with Singapore-based firms, Sero said Oracle is also working with other companies outside Singapore specifically in the areas of healthcare, genomics and location-based services.

In Singapore, the ATSC is currently working with technology distributor ECS Holdings Ltd. and technology firm GT&T on integrating RFID technology with their supply-chain management systems.

“The ATSC is not exactly a research and development lab that focuses on product development. This center is intended to create technology solutions,” said Sero.

“Let me put it this way. India is mainly for product development. China does what can be done to address the domestic market, while the center in Singapore is meant to create technology solutions,” added Williams.

In the next few months, Oracle will use the ATSC to train other software engineers across the Asia Pacific region, the executive said. Oracle Corp. currently employs about 12,000 people in Asia Pacific alone. The ATSC has been in operation since July 2003.