Hot seat awaits Oracle’s new head of support

gallery

Charles Rozwat has been appointed to one of the hottest seats at Oracle – executive vice president for customer services.

If ongoing research by Computer Economics continues in its present vein, he could be a busy man.

The research firm is conducting a web-based rolling survey and early indicators are not very favourable.

Just under half of the E-Business Suite customers (48 per cent) were dissatisfied with Oracle and 41 per cent of respondents using PeopleSoft shared these sentiments.

Things got worse when pricing of support services was scrutinised. 63 per cent of the business suite users felt they were paying too much, along with around half of the PeopleSoft and J D Edwards customers.

The results were based on just over 100 respondents and it was a web-based survey where the dissatisfied were more likely to report than those who are happy with the situation. What it did show, however, was a degree of discomfort with Oracle’s support structure.

Rozwat is well-placed to shake things up but he is a long-term employee of the company. He joined from Digital Equipment in 1994 and rose to become executive vice president of Oracle’s server technologies group, responsible for database, middleware, and systems management products.

Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG), said: “Putting Chuck in charge is a good move, given his pedigree coming from DEC - which was a company that truly understood customer service. And his experience of Oracle development which tends to be the 'choke point' when solving bugs in software.”

The UK user group is known to be quite active and vociferous when it comes to Oracle’s performance. UKOUG has not done a recent survey on support satisfaction, but Miles has a good insight through the organisation’s forums.

“There are two sides to the coin regarding general satisfaction,” he said. “UKOUG surveys show plenty of opportunity for Oracle to improve their support services - though this is usually expressed via 'free text' rather than a 'bad score'."

“On the other side, Oracle has implemented a lot of tools, similar to Microsoft, to ease the support burden for users - but the users choose not to use them. I have not managed to find any 'generic' reasons as to why that couldn’t be fixed.”

Email to a friend

Print this page