Oracle president, Charles Phillips, has singled out NBN Co as an important customer win in the vendor’s Q3 earnings conference call.
Phillips said Oracle had beaten out fierce rival SAP in winning the NBN Co contract.
Oracle reported a revenue increase for its fiscal third quarter, ended 28 February, of 17 per cent from the same period last year, hitting $US6.4 billion.
“The government of Australia had a national initiative to build a national broadband network from scratch,” Phillips told the conference call. “This is a mandate by the government.
“It will be the single largest nation building infrastructure project in Australian history. The Chief Operating Officer selected Oracle who said [inaudible] headquarters two weeks ago and he wants to go wall to wall Oracle and he selected us over SAP.”
While Phillips did not mention the COO by name, according to NBN Co’s website, Kevin Brown is responsible for “Legal, IT, Procurement, Government Relations and Facilities”.
A spokesperson for NBN Co did not immediately confirm whether Oracle had won the contract or whether Brown was responsible for the decision. No further information on the deal was available except that it was referenced as part of Oracle wins in the applications space.
Earlier in March, NBN Co hired Accenture to host HR applications and provide support to NBN Co employees via the web and phone. It also awarded a consulting contract to Goldman Sachs as an advisor in its negotiations with Telstra.
This week NBN Co claimed strong industry support for its layer two network design and choice of Ethernet or Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology for delivering high speed broadband as part of the NBN.
However, Telstra disagreed with the NBN Co’s proposal to have only 100 to 200 points of interconnect (PoI) in the NBN, saying the move is “neither pro-competitive nor pro-choice”.