New ANZ Oracle boss, Stephen Bovis on his plan for 2023

Oracle’s new regional managing director of Australia and New Zealand, Stephen Bovis has four major priorities for the next 12 months as he begins to lead the company through an economic downturn and skills shortage.  

Bovis outlined to Digital Nation his four-point plan at Oracle for the next 12 months that focuses on building out the portfolio, customer centricity, purpose and partners.

Bovis said, “Four areas of where my focus will be around, making sure that we're driving solutions from a business and an industry point of view, being focused around the customer, helping them with the challenges and opportunities that they have advancing our culture.

“Leading with purpose, and then making sure that we're building on that partner experience and leveraging their capabilities.”

He said the company has a "rich portfolio". 

“If we take a customer in terms of that business or that IT transformation they're going through, generally they're looking to solve a number of different problems or create a number of different opportunities,” he explained.

“That could be anything from increasing their efficiencies, reducing costs of their overall operation, it could be improving customer experience and these days it could be even about resiliency in terms of their overall business.”

He said the transformation is a core issue a customer looks at.

“How do we continue to, from a strategy point of view, bring that [transformation] to our customers understand, the challenges they have, and then bring those solutions,” he said.

Bovis highlighted the importance of Oracle's partners.

“We can't do it ourselves; we need partners. We have a strong partner ecosystem across business consultants, systems integrators, many service providers, and ISPs.

“It's how we leverage that partner expertise to help us, in front of the customers solving the problems and the challenges that they have.”

Bovis said this role came about through some conversations with the Oracle team.

He said, “From a business point of view, the timing [of this role] is right. Now that I've been on board for eight weeks, I get more excited every day. In fact, I met my boss before this meeting and there's so much opportunity, and I'm glad I joined [Oracle].”

Customer concerns

While Bovis has only been in the role a short time, he has already begun reaching out to customers and partners to understand some of the major hurdles they’re facing this year.

He said they are currently in the process of increasing efficiencies from a business perspective and managing their costs effectively.

“Where the economy may go, I'm probably a little bit more optimistic than some, but operational efficiencies and cost savings are going to be critical,” he said,

Bovis said increasing efficiencies can also help the issue of the skills shortage currently impacting every business leader in Australia.

“The more efficient they can become from an operational perspective, then hopefully it eases some of the requirements in terms of the talent shortage,” he said.

“They can take talent and move it towards more transformation and driving innovation within their organisation, as opposed to running things.”

Bovis explained he is seeing an issue around attracting and retaining customers and employees. He said IT has an important role to play in improving the overall customer and employee experience.

“If their government it'll be improving the services that they're providing to us as a citizen and the experience that we get when we're consuming those services,” he said.

Enterprise experience

Before accepting this position Bovis spent 18 years at HP Enterprise working in both Singapore and Sydney managing enterprise sales and storage.

Being the managing director at HP Enterprise and leading the company through change and transformation will help Bovis lead the ANZ arm of Oracle.

“Now coming into Oracle, what I'm doing is bringing that local experience in terms of being close to the Australian and New Zealand market, bringing some of that global context that I have, and being around the technology space.

“Working with partners working with customers closely over the last number of decades that experience comes out now that I'm here at Oracle,” he ended.