Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

by Matthew Symonds

Ellison was certain that Oracle could not succeed if it had both an offensive and a defensive strategy.

The analogy he used was taken from the Six-Day War, when the Israelis had been willing to bet everything on taking out the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground even if it meant leaving their own airspace un-protected.

lurch

no-brainer.

by 1998, the Internet was nothing if not fashionable.

Thinking you know things you don’t know leads to a lot of mistakes.

I learned that a key to making money in sales at Oracle was negotiating a low profit target or quota. I decided to fix that problem.”

Patronage

Ellison was signaling in the clearest possible way that Lane’s power was in terminal decline.

The objective of a good comp plan is simply stated: it should be transparent and fair and encourage the achievement of carefully worked out “stretch” targets;

watershed.

unheralded

partisan

scrupulously

thin-skinned

It was like a time-and-motion study from the 1930s.

With all these separate databases, we were paying extra for inconsistent data—paying extra not to know.

And all the problems seemed to have the same source: too many separate systems, too many separate databases. It really was a stunning discovery. All these separate process automation systems have to be integrated and sit on top of one database.

went off the wall.

serendipity.

epiphany.

yin-yang diagram

“Better information allows you to improve your processes.

The more complete your process, the better yo...

It’s a virtuous...

Larry’s insight was to change the game by saying that instead of just talking about transactions we had to start talking about extracting business intelligence from our applications.

The idea in marketing terms is to move up a ladder.

If everybody else is on one rung of the ladder, you move to the rung above them with a different message. The next rung of the applications ladder for us was business intelligence, and we built a campaign around ‘Do you know . . . ?

unbounded.

perennially

While a few high-tech companies were seen as e-business pioneers—Dell and Cisco Systems,

pernicious

You have to have test environments and staging environments and of course the production environment itself.

I was a weak king surrounded by a bunch of strong and fiercely independent dukes.

Ellison’s favorite example of the way this system operated was the work of the supposedly powerful pricing committee. Chairing the committee, which sets prices for all of Oracle’s software, used to be a pretty thankless task.

We’re competing against ourselves. This is embarrassing.

Incomplete automation is almost as big a problem as data fragmentation.

As well as forcing IT and development to work together as one, Ellison began the process of globalizing Oracle with IT.

feudal barons.

The idea of relying on the corporate center for their mission-critical systems was anathema to them.

First, the decision was made to provide the new global IT systems for “free” rather than as an allocated cost.

But it was the same deal as for IT: if you wanted to keep your own marketing organization, you paid for it.

We now have less than ten people working on product pricing.

I could always make policy, but now, for the first time, I could enforce it.”

wheeler-dealer

protracted

First, identify the decision maker and enter their e-mail address into our sales automation system. Second, send them a set of key customer references—case studies showing how much customers saved by converting from IBM DB2 to Oracle—showing how they got better performance and ran on lower-cost hardware. Third, send them a proposal quantifying their cost saving in hardware, software, and labor if they pick Oracle rather than DB2. Finally, send them a standard contract and a price quote. If we have an engineered, proven sales process, we will sell more software. The purpose of new sales automation systems is to allow standard sales processes to be defined and implemented across the sales force. That’s real sales automation.

I want every salesman to change the way they sell against IBM. Press a button, and everyone’s PowerPoint presentation becomes the latest version of the pitch. Press a button, and great new references are automatically sent to our sales prospects. Press a button, and the new demo is online.”

cobrowsing

unrepentant