Last week I saw something I though would never witness. I really believed that Larry would die as the CEO of Oracle, but in a quite surprising decision, he stepped down as the CEO of his beloved company.
Well, I was surprised, but I must confess that as a competitor of Oracle, I'm delighted!
Why it is so? Well, in the case of Safra Catz, I will not say much. She has been around Oracle for a long time, so maybe all the finance situation of the company was already being managed by her. However, although she seems to have been the "deal maker" after Oracle's acquisitions, I doubt she was the one deciding which companies to buy or not, as I have the feeling that it was Larry in person who made the important decisions, and Safra just executed. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, as in my tenure at Oracle I never had such a high level contact with the management.
With Mark Hurd things are different, in my opinion. I was very surprised when he was hired by Larry. After all, he was the man that drove HP to irrelevancy, and that practically destroyed the R+D at HP. Some people say that he just brought order to the financial situation of the company, and that he infused discipline to a company that was quite "anarchic", but, I think that he nearly destroyed the company and just lead them to be irrelevant. I am not saying they are not making money, but they are not relevant. They moved to a business where they are just competing in services and low margin servers and PCs, a field where they just compete with the Dells and Lenovos of the world, which is a legit business, of course, but it is far from the innovative philosophy that identified HP from the very beginning, and its margins are quite narrower than with top notch technology.
Indeed, when Hurd left HP, I heard a rumor saying that he had been fired because all the people at HP were tired of him and how he was destroying the company's spirit... But that is just a rumor.
During my tenure at Oracle, some of the guys that had been working there since the old times, remembered how Oracle used to be a great company for engineers, and how they were devoted to solving customer's problems. And how the technical knowledge was really rewarded. It seems everything changed more or less after they acquired Peoplesoft. Since then, the company has changed to be just sales oriented, techies are not so valued anymore, and the pressure to just sell and close the deals, propagates from top to bottom, no matter what the customer really needs, no matter if the technology is not good: they just have to close the deal and fulfill the selling objectives.
In my opinion this is quite dangerous in the long term. For instance, last year Larry in person announced the desired in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c. The good news here is that Mark could repeat this year in the Oracle World the same speech Larry did in the event last year, as one year after, it seems that Oracle finally was able to finally release that option (even though I heard many customers have already been paying for this in advance, when it was not ready at all).
The situation I witnessed at Oracle is that they are so sure their customers will not go away, that they are not investing in R+D and innovation what a company like Oracle should be doing. I remember some funny conversations with the product managers of several products that may illustrate this point very clearly, but I'll keep them to myself (or maybe for another blog entry... ;-) ).
In any case, my point here is that Oracle is quite sure that customers will keep buying from them, mainly in the database space, because they are so trapped that they cannot go anywhere else. And as they cannot go anywhere, they just keep squeezing the cash-cow they think their customers are, to fulfill their cash objectives. And sometimes it is true. Sometimes customers willing to change because they find abusive what they pay for maintenance or licenses for a commodity product, cannot go away because they made the mistake of build all the provisioning scripts in pl/sql, and migrating that code to a different database is more expensive than paying Oracle the fee. Or the core of their business is so trapped into Oracle products that a migration would risk their business at all. So they stay with Oracle. By now.
However, as I said, this is the short term. In the long term, customers are realizing that there are other options, at a fraction of the cost of an Oracle system, sometimes with better performance. There you have DB2, the NoSQL options, the more specialized products such as PureData for Analytics (Netezza) for the DataWarehouse or the MySQL llikes. Indeed, this is one of the three reasons why I believe Larry bought Sun: (1) Owning Java, (2) trying to become IBM with a hardware division, and most of all, (3) not allowing MySQL eroding the Oracle's install base.
As a sample, this is how we advertised MySQL at Sun: "90% Oracle's functionality, 10% the cost". And we had a lot of traction in the market. And then they bought Sun. And increased the cost of maintenance and licenses of MySQL...
Another sample of my experience with Oracle and Mark Hurd. Just after the integration, they replaced my "old" VAIO laptop with a standard approved Oracle laptop, a Dell one, with a 64 bit processor. Of course, the operating system was 32 bits, so I was not able to use all the memory and features of the laptop. I asked my manager about the new Windows 7 Oracle edition for internal use, which was not yet available, so he told me to follow the official procedure to get the software: basically, requesting Mr. Hurd permission to use Windows 7 in my laptop. I took this as a NO, I would not dare asking that to the president of the company... so I ended up installing SuSE Linux, of course. This is just anecdotal, but shows the way of doing things that Hurd is imposing at Oracle. Just cutting every cost, just selling to customers, no matter how.
So, in the long term, with no more innovation in their products, with customers getting angrier and angrier as they just see the bill increasing for no reason, and R+D going the way the HP's R+D were, well, for an Oracle's competitor like me, appointing Hurd (and Catz) as co-CEOs, are just great news.
If you want to read a less passionate article describing the new CEOs, you can click the following link.
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| Cheers Larry! Enjoy retirement. |
Why it is so? Well, in the case of Safra Catz, I will not say much. She has been around Oracle for a long time, so maybe all the finance situation of the company was already being managed by her. However, although she seems to have been the "deal maker" after Oracle's acquisitions, I doubt she was the one deciding which companies to buy or not, as I have the feeling that it was Larry in person who made the important decisions, and Safra just executed. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, as in my tenure at Oracle I never had such a high level contact with the management.
With Mark Hurd things are different, in my opinion. I was very surprised when he was hired by Larry. After all, he was the man that drove HP to irrelevancy, and that practically destroyed the R+D at HP. Some people say that he just brought order to the financial situation of the company, and that he infused discipline to a company that was quite "anarchic", but, I think that he nearly destroyed the company and just lead them to be irrelevant. I am not saying they are not making money, but they are not relevant. They moved to a business where they are just competing in services and low margin servers and PCs, a field where they just compete with the Dells and Lenovos of the world, which is a legit business, of course, but it is far from the innovative philosophy that identified HP from the very beginning, and its margins are quite narrower than with top notch technology.
Indeed, when Hurd left HP, I heard a rumor saying that he had been fired because all the people at HP were tired of him and how he was destroying the company's spirit... But that is just a rumor.
During my tenure at Oracle, some of the guys that had been working there since the old times, remembered how Oracle used to be a great company for engineers, and how they were devoted to solving customer's problems. And how the technical knowledge was really rewarded. It seems everything changed more or less after they acquired Peoplesoft. Since then, the company has changed to be just sales oriented, techies are not so valued anymore, and the pressure to just sell and close the deals, propagates from top to bottom, no matter what the customer really needs, no matter if the technology is not good: they just have to close the deal and fulfill the selling objectives.
In my opinion this is quite dangerous in the long term. For instance, last year Larry in person announced the desired in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c. The good news here is that Mark could repeat this year in the Oracle World the same speech Larry did in the event last year, as one year after, it seems that Oracle finally was able to finally release that option (even though I heard many customers have already been paying for this in advance, when it was not ready at all).
The situation I witnessed at Oracle is that they are so sure their customers will not go away, that they are not investing in R+D and innovation what a company like Oracle should be doing. I remember some funny conversations with the product managers of several products that may illustrate this point very clearly, but I'll keep them to myself (or maybe for another blog entry... ;-) ).
In any case, my point here is that Oracle is quite sure that customers will keep buying from them, mainly in the database space, because they are so trapped that they cannot go anywhere else. And as they cannot go anywhere, they just keep squeezing the cash-cow they think their customers are, to fulfill their cash objectives. And sometimes it is true. Sometimes customers willing to change because they find abusive what they pay for maintenance or licenses for a commodity product, cannot go away because they made the mistake of build all the provisioning scripts in pl/sql, and migrating that code to a different database is more expensive than paying Oracle the fee. Or the core of their business is so trapped into Oracle products that a migration would risk their business at all. So they stay with Oracle. By now.
However, as I said, this is the short term. In the long term, customers are realizing that there are other options, at a fraction of the cost of an Oracle system, sometimes with better performance. There you have DB2, the NoSQL options, the more specialized products such as PureData for Analytics (Netezza) for the DataWarehouse or the MySQL llikes. Indeed, this is one of the three reasons why I believe Larry bought Sun: (1) Owning Java, (2) trying to become IBM with a hardware division, and most of all, (3) not allowing MySQL eroding the Oracle's install base.
 |
| A PureData for Analytics (I know it doesn't have to do with the post, but I like the picture and the PDA) |
As a sample, this is how we advertised MySQL at Sun: "90% Oracle's functionality, 10% the cost". And we had a lot of traction in the market. And then they bought Sun. And increased the cost of maintenance and licenses of MySQL...
Another sample of my experience with Oracle and Mark Hurd. Just after the integration, they replaced my "old" VAIO laptop with a standard approved Oracle laptop, a Dell one, with a 64 bit processor. Of course, the operating system was 32 bits, so I was not able to use all the memory and features of the laptop. I asked my manager about the new Windows 7 Oracle edition for internal use, which was not yet available, so he told me to follow the official procedure to get the software: basically, requesting Mr. Hurd permission to use Windows 7 in my laptop. I took this as a NO, I would not dare asking that to the president of the company... so I ended up installing SuSE Linux, of course. This is just anecdotal, but shows the way of doing things that Hurd is imposing at Oracle. Just cutting every cost, just selling to customers, no matter how.
So, in the long term, with no more innovation in their products, with customers getting angrier and angrier as they just see the bill increasing for no reason, and R+D going the way the HP's R+D were, well, for an Oracle's competitor like me, appointing Hurd (and Catz) as co-CEOs, are just great news.
If you want to read a less passionate article describing the new CEOs, you can click the following link.
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