Larry 'Unbreakable' Ellison not invulnerable

Larry 'Unbreakable' Ellison not invulnerable

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Lela E. Madjiah
The Jakarta Post
San Francisco, California
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Attending Larry Ellison's question and answer session during
the Oracle OpenWorld 2001 here opened my eyes to his other side
that is not apparent when he's talking business.

Sitting crossed-legged on a stool, the "King of O" still
commanded attention even when he was not talking about the
Unbreakable Oracle9i, his company's latest technology.

Instead, he talked about reviving a past hobby, his boat
Sayonara, the joy and perils of the ocean, and Oracle Racing, his
sailing team, that would take up the challenge to win the America
Cup, sailing's most coveted trophy.

"Through sailing I learn that life is short and fragile, but
also glorious," Ellison told his small audience at San
Francisco's Moscone Center.

"It is a humbling experience, too. In tough times, you
discover your own limits," he added, recalling the rough times he
and his team faced at sea.

Coming from Ellison, the admission came as a surprise, a
revelation, especially after hearing him speak of business,
Oracle's achievements, and how he and his company beat the other
competitors, often in a way that might be intimidating.

Consider this. During his presentation of the Unbreakable
Oracle9i earlier on Dec. 4, he and Jeremy Burton, his senior vice
president for product and services marketing, demonstrated the
edge Oracle's e-mail server has as compared to its competitors.
The demo included a scene where he received an e-mail from Bill
Gates saying, "I love you Larry".

"Gotta be a virus. Bill Gates doesn't like me," Larry quipped.

That's Larry's style: direct, challenging, but also witty and
full of irony.

Indeed, he is a fascinating person who has not only
successfully built a business empire but also a "cult".

"They were terrified when they heard this," he said when asked
if he would be driving the boat.

Small wonder that all these conflicting sides to Ellison
inspired Mike Wilson, a staff writer of St. Petersburg Times, to
come up with a book titled The Difference Between God and Larry
Ellison*. (The asterisk on the cover reads, God Doesn't Think
He's Larry Ellison.)

The intriguing title grabbed my attention followed by my
decision to buy the book hours before flying back home to
Jakarta.

The Executive Bios included in the press kit only had three
sentences on Ellison (Did Larry know this?), although was more
generous on his vice presidents.

In fact, Ellison is a man of bold visions. He dared to use the
name Oracle, which was originally a CIA project Ellison and
partner Bob Miner had worked on in a previous company, Ampex.

"They thought that Oracle, the source of wisdom, was a fitting
name for software that answered users' most difficult questions.
It also seemed appropriate that a borrowed idea would have a
borrowed name," writes Wilson.

Indeed, the first version of Oracle was developed based on IBM
researcher Dr. Edgar (Ted) Codd's theory of relational database.
Codd's article, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data
Banks, was published in June 1970 as a solution to the
hierarchical databases that became popular in the 1960s.

Ironically, IBM did not keep its research on the new idea
secret and published papers and articles on relational technology
that inspired Ellison, Miner and Edward A. Oates, with whom he
founded his first company in 1977, Software Development
Laboratories, Inc. (SDL), in California's Silicon Valley.

"... the papers offered a pretty good idea of how to build a
working relational database management system. Ellison understood
that he could not go wrong if he built a system just like IBM's,"
writes Wilson.

"Ellison was the strongest IBM follower, and believer that IBM
could do no wrong, among us," Wilson quoted Oates as saying.

If only the IBM people knew that Ellison would one day become
their fiercest competitor!

Ellison's interest in relational theory was about to change
the software industry forever. While many experts believed that
relational databases would never be commercially viable since
they were too slow, he thought critics were wrong and SDL began
building the first commercially available relational database
management system. Coincidentally, the CIA would become one of
the first customers to purchase the new Oracle product.

Oracle relational databases gave businesses and government
agencies something they desperately needed: quick and easy access
to information.

When people saw what this software could do for them -- when
they understood that knowledge was power -- they lined up to buy
it.

By the mid-1990s Oracle software brought order to people's
lives in ways they were not even aware of. Hotel reservations,
stock trading, phone shopping, video rental and the use of credit
cards came into contact with software made by Oracle or its
competitors.

In 1979, the company changed its name to Relational Software,
Inc. (RSI) and again in 1983 to Oracle Corporation.

After Oracle went public on March 15, 1986, its revenues
skyrocketed from US$55 million in 1986 to $584 million in 1989,
the year that Oracle moved its headquarters to Redwood Shores,
California.

Those growing years and the years that followed elevated
Ellison's stance as a man who sets technology and business
standards. He was the first who threw out the idea of the network
computer or NC. The two words, uttered at an IDC-sponsored
conference in late 1995 in Paris, would set the technology world
on fire and reverberated in the press for months to come.

Ellison is as much a technologist as he is a marketeer, a
trait that plays a significant part in his success.

"While other speakers merely talked about what their products
could do, he actually gave a demonstration. He set up a personal
computer and projected the on-screen image onto a wall. Then he
typed a simple relational query -- for example, he would ask the
computer to list all the employees in a certain department who
earned more than $20,000 -- and waited for the answer.

"People always oohed and aahed when the computer returned the
right information," Wilson writes of Ellison's relational
technology sales efforts.

"People knew Ellison was giving them a sales pitch. But what
they didn't realize was he was also training them to become
relational database users," notes Wilson. "Ellison recognized
that people would not buy his software until they were
comfortable using it."

Ellison is also the drive behind the company's marketing
efforts. He seems obsessed with beating IBM and Microsoft and
takes utter delight in announcing that Oracle is ahead of its
competitors, whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Ellison's drive to always be ahead is highly contagious and is
reflected in the company's obsession with growth. Oracle, the
market leader in relational database software, qualifies as one
of the extraordinary success stories in Silicon Valley -- or, for
that matter, in American business.

Oracle Corporation doubled its sales in 11 of its first 12
years, mutating from four employees and a few hundred thousand
dollars in revenue in its first year to 4,148 employees and $583
million in sales in 1989.

Today, it has 42,927 employees with $11 billion in revenues.

It seems that Ellison is unbeatable and unstoppable,
especially now that he has come up with this unbreakable thing.
But don't worry, there's one thing Ellison cannot defeat: the
sea, where he remains humble, fully aware of his limits as a
human being.