Emerging markets are growing very fast and Oracle is looking to support the growth with their experts. This was the message from the Nairobi Oracle Day held at the Safari Park Hotel.

Tina Patel , Oracle's Country Director for Kenya, said the event attracted 360 people and focused on Oracle cloud, applications, IT transformation. "Keynote speakers including Oracle executives will speak on products, Fusion middleware, share experiences on global ICT trends and explore how our local customers and prospects can transform their businesses using this new technology," Tina said. Janusz Naklicki, Oracle Vice President for Africa, Middle East, Eastern and Central Europe region also gave a keynote speech where he spoke on Oracle's recent products.

The firm is hiring about 200 people in the Middle East region. Naklicki says that Oracle is so serious about it that they have put an "Oracle is hiring" desk at the Gitex exhibition in Dubai. The recruitment desk stood out at the Nairobi Open Day. Skills that Oracle is looking for range from pre-sales, customer care and account representatives. Oracle is even ready to offer training to new employees.

Patel says that Oracle's Kenya office has been operational for 5 years, growing from 5 employees to over 40. The ongoing recruitment focusses on skilled individuals in Oracle hardware, Fusion middleware and Oracle applications.

Plans to expand presence in the country includes opening of a competency centre for it's partners in the region. The centre will include a partner hub, partner academy, migration center and a partner studio. The partner academy is a training centre for partners, offering training at a fraction of normal fees. The migration centre offers opportunities for partners to migrate to new Oracle solutions from older versions or other solutions. The partner studio offers a place for smaller partners to present solutions to their customers. Oracle plans to launch the centre early next year.

Naklicki dispelled the notion that Oracle software is costly, saying that software costs are normally about 10 per cent of project costs. He said "Customers instead stand to gain more savings from the tried and tested solutions we implement rather than experimenting."

Oracle's Cloud is available globally and Nacklicki expects it to grow big. He says the service will allow Oracle partners to offer solution.

Oracle has purposely been building systems that are made up of both hardware and software integrated together from scratch. "When we were designing these systems, we decided to solve the problem of the complex data pieces and performance, online transaction processing, data warehouse and fix loads." Naklicki says the key is the Exadata software that allows transactions to perform 10 times to 50 times faster.

Exalytics does database and analytics computation in memory providing a massive boost in performance. Such performance is preferred by telcos, energy sector industries and government.

Oracle also recently launched the SPARC SuperCluster computers which targets data centres. Naklicki said the SPARC provides six times faster processing power and can run open system and database. This contrasts with the previous Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytic solutions which are designed to work on just Oracle solutions to provide faster performance.