Larry 'Unbreakable' Ellison not invulnerable person

Lela E. Madjiah, The Jakarta Post, San Francisco, California

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.

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".

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 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.

Indeed, the first version of Oracle, meaning the source of wisdom, 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.

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.

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.

His 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.