The Friday Interview:Paul Rellis is not your typical Microsoft executive despite having been appointed the software giant's top man in Ireland last November, writes John Collins.
With a background as an accountant and a globetrotting career in Pepsi, he has not followed the traditional Microsoft route of earning his spurs with smaller technology players.
Even his shirt and tie mark him out in Microsoft's sleek corporate offices in Dublin where Chinos and polo shirts are the uniform of senior executives.
The week, as he sits down with The Irish Times, Microsoft completes Service Pack 1 for its much-maligned Windows Vista operating system. Traditionally, large businesses wait for this first tranche of patches and fixes before adopting any major new software release. With the well-documented issues on Vista, it's been even more anticipated.
"I have yet to meet anyone who would not convert back to the old versions," Rellis concedes in a show of disarming frankness. So far, so different.
An eight-year veteran of Microsoft in Ireland, Rellis trained with Craig Gardner (later absorbed by PricewaterhouseCoopers) as an accountant in his native Limerick. In the early 1990s, he joined Coca-Cola International as an auditor - the US company's preferred career path for those aspiring to senior managers.
By his own admission he did a lot of travelling to posts in North America, South America and Germany. Rather fortuitously for this globe-trotter his Irish wife was also an auditor for Coca-Cola.
"I spent the first two weeks with Coke on a delivery truck in Atlanta [ headquarters of the soft drink giant]," Rellis recalls.
"They send you out unloading trucks and checking checkers - it was a completely different language."
At the end of 1999, Rellis, his wife and their two young children decided it was time to return to Ireland from their base in Germany. He made a conscious decision that he wanted to move into the technology centre and in Ireland, Microsoft was, and is, one of the more prestigious foreign companies operating in the Republic.
He was initially passed over for a role as finance director with Microsoft's operations centre in Dublin and declined an offer to take another role with the company in Ireland. A month later he got the call to say the original candidate was not taking the job. Shortly after Rellis was on a flight home from Germany.
In the age of Google and YouTube, Microsoft may seem like an ageing giant, but the Seattle-headquartered company has done a lot of growing up during the eight years Rellis has been there.
When he joined, the company employed about 26,000 staff globally; it has now grown to 75,000. Its flagship Windows and Office products have become ubiquitous while it is invested heavily in new areas such as mobile, internet and games consoles.
"It was just hitting that stage of maturity, which was great from a learning point of view but bad from a stock-option point of view. But there you go, life is all about timing," he says, laughing.
Microsoft in Ireland has also been transformed during that period. Back in 1999, it still had its own manufacturing line churning out CDs for EMEA customers.
Rellis credits his boss at the time - Kevin Dillon - for having the foresight to realise the local operations were going to have to reinvent themselves. Dillon went on to hold senior European roles in the company and is now a partner with high-profile technology investment house Atlantic Bridge Ventures.
"His vision was we have to modernise, become more productive, outsource where it's right and compensate for what we are outsourcing by bringing higher value work into the organisation," Rellis explains.
"We've done the same in the development space. We have started to outsource some of the things we can get better value for and bring in higher class development."Employment in Microsoft's Irish operations has fluctuated since the start of the decade about the 1,700 mark.
The European Development Centre, which initially localised products but has now taken on responsibility for parts of some of Microsoft's core products, now employs 500.
There are 1,000 staff at the EMEA Operations Centre, which used to be manufacturing but now handles the "order-to-cash process" and is the hub for Microsoft's back-office in 126 countries.
Rellis now sits inside the sales, services and marketing - Microsoft Ireland, which has 150 people, but he also has a role as "overall site lead".
"We basically brought this from being a manufacturing site to being a core part of the Microsoft delivery engine in the region," he says. "Yes, we increased our cost base but we fundamentally increased value to the corporation by multiples of that increase. That's what it's about."
Rellis has a very different style than his older and more polished Australian predecessor Joe Macri, who has gone on to manage Microsoft's marketing activities in western Europe, but in terms of his priorities for the job he is singing from the same hymn sheet. Macri made Microsoft synonymous with productivity and competitiveness, investing his own time and commissioning studies to ensure it was clear that the two had to be inter-related priorities for Ireland Inc.
His successor will address the Irish Management Institute conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Powerscourt in April on what Ireland needs to do to stay as a high performance economy.
"There is a great opportunity for Ireland to grasp the modernisation and productivity agenda," says Rellis, holding up the National Competitiveness Council Report, which, he says, contains every benchmark that the State needs to measure its performance.
"You don't get many countries that are this transparent around what they need to do and where they see the problems," he says. "That's a fantastic first step. We have to go now and actually do it."
Rellis is unequivocal about what Ireland's main economic asset is - the quality of our labour force. "When you talk about Ireland, you are really talking about Irish people and they are incredibly well respected for their ability."
Despite forebodings of doom due to the fall-off in those studying engineering and technology in our third-level colleges, in the short term (the next two to three years), he does not foresee any major talent problem for Microsoft in Ireland. "Without being arrogant about it, that's because we are able to attract great people; we have a cachet in the market," he says confidently.
Where he does see a "compete problem" is if Microsoft decided it wanted to increase significantly the size of its Irish operations - perhaps going from 500 developers to 5,000 - and that's an issue that can only be addressed in a five- to 10-year time-frame.
Rellis recalls a recent event in Berlin where Microsoft founder Bill Gates said what he wanted from Ireland was not just our top 5 per cent of engineering and technology graduates but also our finest young minds in business, marketing and accounting.
Any plans for Microsoft expansion in Ireland are academic at the moment. Last November, it confirmed a $500 million investment to build a state-of-the-art data centre in the Grange Castle Business Park on the outskirts of Dublin.
"We're going to have a physical business and an online business in the future and we want to build the plumbing, the architecture, the infrastructure to support that business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa," he says. "This is going to be the hub and we've made a big capital commitment.
"It is the single biggest capital investment Microsoft has ever made outside of the US."
With Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo on the table, Rellis is reluctant to talk about the offer or what it might mean for the world's largest software company, other than to say Microsoft is getting serious about building a successful internet business. He laughs. "I think people missed our signals before and now we are giving them a big signal."
ON THE RECORD
Name: Paul Rellis
Age:40
Family:Married with five children
Why he is in the news:Following his elevation to head up Microsoft in Ireland last November, next week he will become president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland, succeeding Intel's main man in the Republic, Jim O'Hara.
Something you might expect:Having attended Crescent secondary school in Limerick, he describes himself as a huge Munster rugby fan and regularly visits Thomond Park for matches.
Something you might not expect:During the summer he occasionally cycles into work from his Killiney home.
