Blog: Dan Power

« Oracle OpenWorld--Getting Started | Main | Oracle Fusion -- Hope for Innovative Decision Support »

Oracle's 30th Anniversary

Last night, Sunday, November 11, 2007, Larry Ellison reminisced for approximately 45 minutes about the early days of Oracle. Larry dedicated the opening session at Oracle OpenWorld to Bob Miner, the first President of the company that became Oracle. Bob died of cancer in 1994. Larry, Bob and Ed Oates co-founded Software Development Laboratories in November 1977.

After listening to Larry, I am once again impressed with the dominating influence that vision has on creating a successful company. Larry, Bob and Ed wanted to create the first commercial relational database product and they did. They knew little about business and their efforts were under capitalized, but they sold the idea and then delivered the product and kept pushing to innovate and improve the product. The initial capitalization was $2000, but a "big" contract and risk taking got Oracle started and on it's way to success. The first release of Oracle was version 2. Larry joked who would have wanted to buy version 1.

This morning I listened to Charles Phillips, Oracle co-President, and Hector de J. Ruiz, President of AMD. Phillips with help from Chuck Rozwat basically provided a high-level product demo with a focus on various "needs" including using business data for actionable insight, i.e., operational data-driven decision support. I was bothered that Phillips and the Oracle product people call the business intelligence, performance management and other data-driven DSS development products middleware. Perhaps use the term development tools, but I don't think use of the "middleware" category will catch on.

Integration of operational business decision support and transaction processing was the message, but the example presented of a manager seeing a sales problem caused by insufficient product and then directly processing an order in an inventory system seems unrealistic. We will need to consolidate a number of distinct roles in the organization hierarchy to create that type of task integration. It is not enough that technology can support task integration ... but will organization roles allow, encourage, and permit it?

Ruiz with help from customers and partners identified 3 business needs that are the "point of the arrow" for technology innovation: 1) improved global communication and collaboration for project teams, 2) real-time analytics and compelling web content, and 3) simplifying IT management and reducing IT maintenance so more time can be spent on creative applications. Shane Robson briefly mentioned HP's Halo which is a high cost solution to need #1. John Fowler of Sun focused on the real-time solution for MLB.com. Finally, Mark Jarvis, a Dell Marketing guy, tried to address the simplification/creative applications need and failed. Oh well Mark, we don't know the answer yet! Keep trying.

I spent 2 hours on the exhibit floor and toured around with an Intel guide. So far I have only been in the South building of Moscone for exhibits. The West building has another exhibit area. I am already information overloaded and I can only imagine what customers must be feeling.

I'm heading to hear Mark Hurd discuss the information challenge in the technology sector. Information technology is enabling and creating business opportunities, but perhaps sometimes the industry folks get ahead of the management crowd. We will see.

Share: