Today, though Natasak still looks after local operations, he has additional responsibilities, to oversee other Asean markets as the new regional managing director of Oracle in Asean. He's the first Thai to take this top role.

Natasak now has to lead country management teams in Asean countries as well as Oracle's South Asia Growth Economies (SAGE) region, covering Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, promoting market development.

As Oracle Thailand's managing director, he still oversees long-term business development, customer care, as well as government and community relations. He also plans to make Thailand into a successful model for developing and improving markets in other Asean countries.

Another aspect of his plan is to expand the social-contribution activities such as the think.com project and Oracle Education Initiatives in Thailand to every country in the region.

"These projects offer more chances to children in each country to learn and access the Internet to improve their IT skills. With IT facilities provided, we hope that children will be able to develop new things, learn more and get in touch with new digital behaviour, while improving their creativity as well as their imaginations," he said.

As the Asean market has around 500 million population, Natasak said he saw high potential and a huge market, even if the various country had different cultures and different languages.

The important thing, he added, was to lessen the gap between countries so that they could tune in and link ideas to run businesses smoothly, and achieve the same goals.

Under his strategic plan, partnership is crucial. He said he would create partnerships and work more with local companies to develop products while helping them expand their best-practice operations, which had succeeded in one country, to other countries.

"I am confident that with strong partnerships and support from Oracle, we can help them bring their products to market, not only in their own countries but in other countries as well," said Natasak.

At this stage, Oracle has established centres of excellence in four countries - Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

He said this was the company's key strategy, to use the centre as a channel to cooperate with local partners and help them develop new ideas to support the market. Ideas with potential that would be developed in the centres include the digital city, radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, healthcare, military, graphics and database products.

Natasak said once these succeeded, they would be marketed in other countries in the region.

Natasak felt that Pakistan and Vietnam are currently the highest potential markets in the region. This is because Pakistan's government is planning to turn the country into a new modernised one while Vietnam is opening for international investment. "It would benefit Oracle's business to grasp these markets," he said.

Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation