US-based Oracle, one of the world's leading business solution providers, is to set up a global support centre in this port city of Northeast China's Liaoning Province.

The Dalian centre, targeting the firm's customers in China and the Republic of Korea, is one of Oracle's 18 support centres providing world coverage.

"We are just to meet the inquiries and requests in this rapidly changing market in North Asia, " said Tom Shields, Oracle Product Support vice-president.

Oracle is one of the world's leading IT service providers attending the 4th China International Software and Information Service Fair being held in the city from yesterday to June 25.

Since its "Golden China Plan" was launched in 2002, Oracle has established a development centre in Shenzhen and a research centre in Beijing.

The Dalian investment marks the beginning of the second phase of Oracle's China plan.
"We hope to provide our products and services to more cities in China to support their rapid economic growth," said Shields.

Shields said Oracle sees the opportunity in China's strategy to revitalize the economy in Northeast China and its efforts to build Dalian into one of the world's IT service centres.

"We want to do more business because China is one of the most important markets for Oracle," said Shields.

Unlike other IT giants' centres in Dalian also targeting Japan, Oracle wanted to establish a foundation to win customers and then further its operation in the region.

"So the working team now is not so big and will expand driven by our continuous business," said Shields.

"But the centre here is part of our global teams and will receive training, best practices and share knowledge with our other 17 support centres," he said.

Located near Japan and the Republic of Korea, good communications and a reservoir of multilingual talents from Northeast Asia has seen Dalian become an ideal place for the world's leading IT companies to set up centres providing service to clients in the region. Oracle is now one of a cluster of IT giants such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, SAP and Accenture in the city.

"We will spare no effort to draw more IT giants to the city and better our support to them," said Vice-Mayor Dai Yulin.

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