blog Larry Ellison’s baby hasn’t yet confirmed precisely what is going on here, but several outlets have this morning reported that Oracle Australia managing director Tim Ebbeck (pictured, right) has resigned from his post and is currently on gardening leave. iTnews tells us (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“Oracle’s Australia and New Zealand managing director Tim Ebbeck has resigned from his role at the software giant after almost three years leading the local operation.”
Apparently Ebbeck has sent an internal email to the troops outlining his move. You know the drill — if you work at Oracle and want to keep the rest of Australia informed, please feel free to avail yourself of Delimiter’s anonymous tips form. Even we won’t know who you are.
To my mind, this is a significant loss for Oracle Australia.
Ebbeck has been a bit of a wild card at times … some may recall his strident anti-NBN criticism during his time as the local managing director of Oracle rival SAP, which somehow resulted in him being hired by the NBN company; or the time that Ebbeck attempted to take on a popular global IT analyst on Twitter and ended up with a bit of egg on his face.
However, I have personally spoken with Ebbeck a number of times, and I have to say that I believe he has been a strong asset to Oracle in Australia.
He’s got an unorthodox style very different from Oracle Australia’s previous ‘safe pair of hands’, long-running local managing director Ian White.
However, Ebbeck knows the enterprise software turf in great detail. In my conversations with him, I’ve found that the executive’s depth of knowledge about events both up-front and behind the scenes in the industry has been extremely strong, and his understanding of the sector profound. It’s not often that I have found an executive who I have respected as much. Ebbeck is ‘old-school’, and savvy, rather than buttoned-down and naive.
So why is Ebbeck leaving at this time?
To be honest, I’m not sure. However, informed readers will remember that Oracle Australia only a few months ago turfed its entire Australian support operation. One might hazard a guess at the fact that there are further moves beneath the surface at Julius Avenue in North Ryde.
Insiders have told Delimiter the executive’s most recent email to the Australia/New Zealand Oracle staff included the following sentences: “I scheduled a long overdue break over the past week after a tremendous end to 2016! And its also why I have decided to move on now.”
Image credit: Oracle, Creative Commons