KEY POINTS:
Steve Murray, newly appointed New Zealand head of global technology services company EDS, is a poster boy for the management talent you should find at the top level of an IT company.
Murray, a former commercial jet pilot who has an MBA, led the turn-around of Tainui Group
Holdings during a four-year stint as chief executive of the iwi business.
Now at the helm of EDS, he is preaching a compelling - if management-speak-laden - message about developing the company's business.
EDS is an entrenched part of the operations of numerous government departments and some of the country's largest corporates including Fonterra and Telecom.
Murray's plan for growth involves moving clients' IT processes up a notch through a process he calls "applications modernisation". This is essentially getting them doing smarter things with newer IT that will increase their productivity while at the same time boosting EDS's bottom line.
"Our key focus over the next period of time will be to move up the value chain and start playing in what I'm calling the strategic space," Murray says.
The plan makes sense and is necessary as EDS jostles for its share of the $5 billion New Zealand businesses spend annually on technology.
Another new arrival in a top management spot, Microsoft New Zealand MD Helen Robinson, made similar noises shortly after she took over the country manager role at the software giant in July.
Robinson's pitch was more in-your-face than Murray's.
She talked about the need to derail the old boys network within the IT sector which she accused of being "self-preserving and building great big IT teams in businesses without focusing on the business's need".
It was certainly a way to stamp her mark in the new job.
Below the war-cry level of Murray and Robinson scurry an army of IT sales professionals charged with actually making the pitches direct to potential clients.
They are a charismatic lot; they hob-nob diligently and effectively with the powerbrokers and chequebook wielders in Wellington and Auckland IT circles.
Sometimes their companies win the contracts, sometimes they don't. But they persevere knowing it's a long-term game and another contract is always around the corner.
An important part of the sales and support process is the vendor conferences, where top clients get to mingle with company execs and gurus.
Oracle's annual OpenWorld event, held in San Francisco last week, is an example of how to do client schmoozing well.
OpenWorld - which drew a staggering 41,000 registered visitors this year - is both a chance for practical networking between Oracle users and the company's technology experts and business partners, and a flag-waving opportunity for the industry's celebrity executives.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison raised a laugh during his keynote, but probably didn't win any New Zealand friends, when he claimed that with a global support network that spoke 27 languages Oracle had the largest software support organisation in the world.
"We even speak Kiwi, which is a form of English, so that would be 28 languages if you count that," Ellison quipped.
Ellison likes to share the OpenWorld limelight with the chiefs of Oracle's industry partners such as Dell's Michael Dell and Cisco's John Chambers.
The heavyweight lineup of speakers adds value to the event for those attending and gives industry leaders a forum to push their latest messages.
This year a couple of themes dominated the pitches. While last year selling ways to do effective corporate governance seemed to be all the rage, this year one of the key appeals was to customers' dislike for being locked in to "proprietary" systems.
Those vendors who could all took the opportunity to tout the "interoperability" factors their products offered.
Secondly, the big players were preaching an environmental message and talking about their efforts to design more power-efficient technologies.
Michael Dell, for example, said his company built and delivered about 23.5 million desktop computers last year.
If each of them had the power profile of the company's 70 per cent more efficient showcase OptiPlex 745 desktop customers would have saved US$1.6 billion ($2.4 billion) in electricity costs, the equivalent of 12.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, Dell said.
Furthermore, last year Dell recovered nearly 20,000 tonnes of IT equipment from customers that was reused or recycled, he said.
But does this type of grandstanding appeal to those who make the decisions on IT spending?
Simon Brock of Wellington, who attended OneWorld and is the main database specialist for Public Trust, which last year invested millions in new hardware and software (including Oracle), said the technical sessions and insights from global experts made the event worthwhile.
* Simon Hendery travelled to OpenWorld as a guest of Oracle.
