Larry 'Unbreakable' Ellison not invulnerable person<\/p>\n
Lela E. Madjiah, The Jakarta Post, San Francisco, California<\/p>\n
Attending Larry Ellison's question and answer session during
\nthe Oracle OpenWorld 2001 here opened my eyes to his other side
\nthat is not apparent when he's talking business.<\/p>\n
Sitting crossed-legged on a stool, the \"King of O\" still
\ncommanded attention even when he was not talking about the
\nUnbreakable Oracle9i, his company's latest technology.<\/p>\n
Instead, he talked about reviving a past hobby, his boat
\nSayonara, the joy and perils of the ocean, and Oracle Racing, his
\nsailing team, that would take up the challenge to win the America
\nCup, sailing's most coveted trophy.<\/p>\n
\"Through sailing I learn that life is short and fragile, but
\nalso glorious,\" Ellison told his small audience at San
\nFrancisco's Moscone Center.<\/p>\n
Coming from Ellison, the admission came as a surprise, a
\nrevelation, especially after hearing him speak of business,
\nOracle's achievements, and how he and his company beat the other
\ncompetitors, often in a way that might be intimidating.<\/p>\n
Consider this. During his presentation of the Unbreakable
\nOracle9i earlier on Dec. 4, he and Jeremy Burton, his senior vice
\npresident for product and services marketing, demonstrated the
\nedge Oracle's e-mail server has as compared to its competitors.
\nThe demo included a scene where he received an e-mail from Bill
\nGates saying, \"I love you Larry\".<\/p>\n
\"Gotta be a virus. Bill Gates doesn't like me,\" Larry quipped.<\/p>\n
That's Larry's style: direct, challenging, but also witty and
\nfull of irony.<\/p>\n
Indeed, he is a fascinating person who has not only
\nsuccessfully built a business empire but also a \"cult\".<\/p>\n
Small wonder that all these conflicting sides to Ellison
\ninspired Mike Wilson, a staff writer of St. Petersburg Times, to
\ncome up with a book titled The Difference Between God and Larry
\nEllison*. (The asterisk on the cover reads, God Doesn't Think
\nHe's Larry Ellison.)<\/p>\n
The Executive Bios included in the press kit only had three
\nsentences on Ellison (Did Larry know this?), although was more
\ngenerous on his vice presidents.<\/p>\n
In fact, Ellison is a man of bold visions. He dared to use the
\nname Oracle, which was originally a CIA project Ellison and
\npartner Bob Miner had worked on in a previous company, Ampex.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the first version of Oracle, meaning the source of
\nwisdom, was developed based on IBM researcher Dr. Edgar (Ted)
\nCodd's theory of relational database. Codd's article, A
\nRelational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks, was
\npublished in June 1970 as a solution to the hierarchical
\ndatabases that became popular in the 1960s.<\/p>\n
Ironically, IBM did not keep its research on the new idea
\nsecret and published papers and articles on relational technology
\nthat inspired Ellison, Miner and Edward A. Oates, with whom he
\nfounded his first company in 1977, Software Development
\nLaboratories, Inc. (SDL), in California's Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
\"... the papers offered a pretty good idea of how to build a
\nworking relational database management system. Ellison understood
\nthat he could not go wrong if he built a system just like IBM's,\"
\nwrites Wilson.<\/p>\n
\"Ellison was the strongest IBM follower, and believer that IBM
\ncould do no wrong, among us,\" Wilson quoted Oates as saying.<\/p>\n
Ellison's interest in relational theory was about to change
\nthe software industry forever. While many experts believed that
\nrelational databases would never be commercially viable since
\nthey were too slow, he thought critics were wrong and SDL began
\nbuilding the first commercially available relational database
\nmanagement system. Coincidentally, the CIA would become one of
\nthe first customers to purchase the new Oracle product.<\/p>\n
Oracle relational databases gave businesses and government
\nagencies something they desperately needed: quick and easy access
\nto information.<\/p>\n
By the mid-1990s Oracle software brought order to people's
\nlives in ways they were not even aware of. Hotel reservations,
\nstock trading, phone shopping, video rental and the use of credit
\ncards came into contact with software made by Oracle or its
\ncompetitors.<\/p>\n
In 1979, the company changed its name to Relational Software,
\nInc. (RSI) and again in 1983 to Oracle Corporation.<\/p>\n
After Oracle went public on March 15, 1986, its revenues
\nskyrocketed from US$55 million in 1986 to $584 million in 1989,
\nthe year that Oracle moved its headquarters to Redwood Shores,
\nCalifornia.<\/p>\n
Those growing years and the years that followed elevated
\nEllison's stance as a man who sets technology and business
\nstandards. He was the first who threw out the idea of the network
\ncomputer or NC. The two words, uttered at an IDC-sponsored
\nconference in late 1995 in Paris, would set the technology world
\non fire and reverberated in the press for months to come.<\/p>\n
Ellison is as much a technologist as he is a marketeer, a
\ntrait that plays a significant part in his success.<\/p>\n
\"While other speakers merely talked about what their products
\ncould do, he actually gave a demonstration. He set up a personal
\ncomputer and projected the on-screen image onto a wall. Then he
\ntyped a simple relational query -- for example, he would ask the
\ncomputer to list all the employees in a certain department who
\nearned more than $20,000 -- and waited for the answer.<\/p>\n
\"People always oohed and aahed when the computer returned the
\nright information,\" Wilson writes of Ellison's relational
\ntechnology sales efforts.<\/p>\n
\"People knew Ellison was giving them a sales pitch. But what
\nthey didn't realize was he was also training them to become
\nrelational database users,\" notes Wilson. \"Ellison recognized
\nthat people would not buy his software until they were
\ncomfortable using it.\"<\/p>\n
Ellison is also the drive behind the company's marketing
\nefforts. He seems obsessed with beating IBM and Microsoft and
\ntakes utter delight in announcing that Oracle is ahead of its
\ncompetitors, whenever the opportunity presents itself.<\/p>\n
His drive to always be ahead is highly contagious and is
\nreflected in the company's obsession with growth. Oracle, the
\nmarket leader in relational database software, qualifies as one
\nof the extraordinary success stories in Silicon Valley -- or, for
\nthat matter, in American business.<\/p>\n
Oracle Corporation doubled its sales in 11 of its first 12
\nyears, mutating from four employees and a few hundred thousand
\ndollars in revenue in its first year to 4,148 employees and $583
\nmillion in sales in 1989.<\/p>\n
Today, it has 42,927 employees with $11 billion in revenues.<\/p>\n
It seems that Ellison is unbeatable and unstoppable,
\nespecially now that he has come up with this unbreakable thing.
\nBut don't worry, there's one thing Ellison cannot defeat: the
\nsea, where he remains humble, fully aware of his limits as a
\nhuman being.<\/p>",
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