Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25044
An item on the resume here. Csa:la�g��ade, want to buy Hummel is nothing if not optimistic. "We envision an Oracle-user society here," he says, sounding like a more sophisticated version of those flacks who call you trying to convince you that versiQn 7.3.2 of a product is much more �xciting than version 7.3. 1. But then he admits: "It's not going to be like doing business in America for a long time." It's not like all of the former Soviet Union is computer illiterate. Oracle, in fact, had a some what shady head start behind the Iron Curtain, as Shlykov explains. "There was this Bulgarian bootleg of Version 5.0 of our database," he says. "You had guys all over the Soviet Bloc tinkering with it." Evidently it was buggy and notoriously unstable (unlike, of course, our Right-Thinking American Software). The result, now, is a lot of Oracle-sawy, Russian-speaking programmers. Hummel speculates that this is one reason Oracle honchos are confident that when the regional economy matures, this will be a marketing hot spot. A bulk of any success in Central Asia should be chalked up to Shlykov, the "account man- But I wanted a number. He caved in a bit, self Ion. years for them to figure out about my past, " he notes. "It prevented my getting a promotion to the Moscow Embassy, so I quit. " Whoever did the Central Asia hiring was shrewd and recognized that knowing how this very ... different culture works would be a lot more important than being an expert on gob bledy-gook like "embedding objects across various multitask ing operating systems and APls." After all, to make a profit you just have to sell a widget. The customer doesn't have to know how it works. This is a place where contacts, appearances and decorum are everything. Leave your overhead projector at home and bring some expensive hors d'oeuvres instead. "Doing a deal here is a lot more about honor, man hood and saving face than it is about just selling your prod uct, " says Hummel. the botto'm line What about profits? Hummel gave me some vague "percentages," explaining that Oracle Kazakhstan grew 1 ,000 percent its first year (that could mean from a $1 to $10 gross) and profits increased 360 percent last year. He dropped little details like, "We're not at $100 million, but we just finished a thousand-user deal over 14 regions with a bank in Uzbekistan." As the evening went on, I realized that his hesitation to give hard numbers had to do with his concern for personal security. It came to me in the car ride to the Oracle offices when Hummel blanched as Shlykov and I talked about recent attacks on businessmen. Hummel later admits casually that he has been threatened, but " only once." It is wise to employ a healthy dose of cultural relativ ity when analyzing the economy here. In this part of the world, the Mafia doesn't just operate; .it is business. "We don't advertise, " Hummel points out. "We don't want to be an obvious target. " Indeed, in my two and a half weeks in Kazakhstan, there were three well-coordinated, broad-daylight machine gun attacks on businessmen in Almaty, one of them netting $500,000 in cash which someone some how must have known this now bullet-riddled guy was carry ing. Woulq a dollar figure in a newly launched American magazine make it back to Almaty? "Probably not, " Hummel says matter of factly. "But there's a reason for the policy. " II deprecatingly: "Let's put it this way: if we disappeared, you wouldn't read a headline in the Financial Times that says, 'Oracle stock down four.'" "Does Larry Ellison know you're here?" I ask. "We correspond with [Oracle president] Ray Lane," Shlykov replies. Back in the States I called Redwood Shores to check: Lane said he knows about Oracle Kazakhstan, but the name Hummel doesn't ring a bell. I decided not to bring up the for mer Soviet spy who is Hummel's #2 in Central Asia. why they're. here (the lot tery tiCket theory Oracle's theory, evidently, is that With 350 million rela tively educated people in the former Soviet Union, these kinds of offices are small investments to make should the economies of Russia or its former republics ever take off. As Hummel puts it: "We came before the mar ket was ready, but they are building a new country here, and we want to be here." Given that the second world is a cheap Twilight Zone imitation of the First World (By this I mean that at first glance a second-tier Soviet industrial city can look incredibly like an American one except that nothing works.), it is extremel difficult to redict whether the Oracle experimen should be laughed at or studied with awe. The task ere is not ike, say, Vietnam's, which has to physically build an infrastruc ture to support any kind of technological advance. The former Soviet Union has one, albeit in a decrepit state. Oracle Kazakhstan has grown physically: from sOO-square- Hummel's dining room in 1994 to venture is small potatoes in Oracle terms-a billion-dol lar company with their "little $500,000 training facili ties" scattered about the world. Hummel says they "took the plunge" only this year after an "initially small investment," and now have 15 employees in Kazakhstan, with another three in Tashkent. The fact of the matter is that the cost of the Central Asian operation to a company such as Oracle is like buying a who knows? t may pay OTT. l ottery ticket. 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