Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

by Matthew Symonds

Oracle’s business model of switching to a high-volume, low-price approach.

crows.

optometrist.”

It was just a negotiating tactic. If we lowered their bill, they’d pay us this quarter. We didn’t. Lots of tech companies and telcos are under financial stress, so they’re being much more careful with their cash these days.

vaunted

Even today many companies make the incredibly expensive mistake of failing to ask for a guaranteed implementation cost and guaranteed annual operating cost of the applications systems they are about to buy.

flip-flop

interminably

pretensions

“pathological lying.”

Writing checks is easy. Writing software is hard.

legendary.

opulently

trumpeted

galling

seething

primrose path

hodgepodge

smirk

smugly,

The longer a project runs, the less likely it will be to finish.

It’s the 80/20 rule: a project aiming for 100 percent of the benefits will never finish. But if you go for 80 percent, you can get it done in six to nine months.

disenchantment

Making them write it down forced people to carefully study and think through the new process. Most of the time that resulted in them realizing that the new process was okay—98 percent of the cases—but sometimes they found real deficiencies in the software and they wrote down exactly what the engineers needed to do to fix it, which they did.

geek

currently fashionable approach to systems integration in which applications from different vendors are made to work together using specially designed software, known as middleware, that acts as glue, and central data schema created to form a common language.

You can put wings on a car, drive very fast, and it will take off . . . landing safely is another matter.”

hash

eloquence,

smug.

If customers would demand a price guarantee for the total cost of the system before they signed a contract, it would go a long way toward solving this problem. (Total system cost includes: hardware, software, installation, and annual operating costs.)

A far better approach is to buy a system that delivers 80 percent of the benefits of a “perfect” system at 20 percent of the cost. After the 80 percent solution is installed and delivering substantial benefits, you then have the option of incrementally enhancing your system’s automation and information capabilities a little at a time. Going for a 100 percent solution requires a perfect understanding of your business before the project starts and a lot of customization to make the software fit. That is a very expensive and risky approach; you might end up with nothing.

Both our global e-mail system and our global file-sharing systems are based on what has become the Oracle Collaboration Suite.

clairvoyant.

far-flung

wheezing

shrouds,

humming.

leap of faith.

shrewd

conference room pilot” (CRP),

I said, ‘What are you trying to do? We don’t need this level of sophistication and complexity to run this business.’ Because to have this very structured financial cost system means that everything has to be done differently on the manufacturing side.”3

take 80 percent functionality now rather than risk never finishing by holding out for a 100 percent perfect solution that exists only in the imagination.

Kipp says that GE’s managers, culturally used to demanding “everything and now” needed to be told more clearly what’s in their best interests. “If they’re offered this feature, they’re not going to say, ‘Well, I don’t need that.’ But somebody with authority has to be able to say no.”

Our five thousand applications developers put lots of new features into the E-Business Suite based on customer priorities. This close collaboration was what made it possible for most of our customers to avoid the complexity and cost of custom code.

veterans

Anyway, I always recommend a safe, step-by-step implementation process: define a set of standard processes, bring up one location or one division using those processes, then start adding more locations or more divisions. That’s what we’re doing at GE, that’s what we’re doing at Alcoa, that’s what we did at Oracle.

This is game, set, and match in the database business.

“Well, it’s pretty interesting if you can show eight Compaq PC servers running faster and more reliably than the largest IBM mainframe.

Bill’s been talking a lot about Microsoft’s horizontal scalability [using a cluster of little machines to get performance rather than one big machine] strategy. But they can’t make it work. We’ve got horizontal scalability for every application ever written; they have horizontal scalability for one and only one application—their custom version of the TPC-C benchmark [an industry standard database performance test]! It’s amazing. And, it will take IBM and Microsoft a long, long time to catch up. Maybe ten years, but probably never.”