Make no mistake: There will be times when Oracle Corp. jockeys for the same talent as your company. Top executive Steve Miranda acknowledged as much when addressing the annual meeting of the Greater Nashville Technology Council this week.
On paper, Oracle would be a formidable competitor. Of any locally based company, only HCA Healthcare Inc. (NYSE: HCA) has larger annual revenue than Oracle’s $40.5 billion haul. Its Nashville jobs will pay an average of $110,000 a year. During the meeting, tech council CEO Brian Moyer said he believes the majority of its 600 member companies view Oracle and Amazon and other prominent new arrivals as a threat to poach from their payrolls.
But Miranda, who leads Oracle’s Applications division, said he expects the battle for talent will flow both directions.
And to him, that’s not even the point. One reason Oracle is coming to Nashville is to expand the already sizable network of companies it works with — so Miranda encouraged the audience to see Oracle as a potential business partner, rather than strictly a competitor.
“What we’ve seen historically … is that when we’re successful, we have an ecosystem that’s successful,” Miranda said. “There are certainly conflicts, where [we] and a small company want to hire the same person. But there will also be a lot of opportunity to kind of counterbalance that.”
Two months ago, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) paid $254 million for land on the East Bank of the Cumberland River. The software and data-center company plans to invest $1.2 billion creating a 1.2 million-square-foot campus where 8,500 people or more could work within a decade from now.
“From where I sit, we get the flip side: I’m trying to convince employees ‘No, no, you want to work at Oracle,’ and they will tell me ‘No, no, I want to work for a small company. I want a startup. I want to be nimble,’ ” Miranda said. “We’re trying to make Oracle look small: ‘You’re nimble, you’re going to have the ability to grow.’ “
He added: “What we’ve found is there’s people who want to work in either environment: Some people like working for large companies, and some do not. … So I think there’s a place for the big and the small. We tend to do a good job of growing our ecosystem, which is better for everybody.”
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