Oracle’s public image may be that of a sharp-elbowed sales competitor and insatiable eater of terrified companies.
But during speeches kicking off the enterprise software vendor’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Sunday night, the company showed a funnier, more humane side.
In a pair of keynotes by cofounder and CEO Larry Ellison and president and CFO Safra Catz that were collectively called “Sunday Night Live,” the two — especially Ellison — waxed nostalgic about the now-30-year-old company’s origins, especially its own Silicon Valley “start-up in a garage” days.
Ellison started Oracle’s predecessor, Software Development Laboratories, in 1977 with $2,000 of his own money. Its first office was on the famed Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., near Stanford University.
Things back then were done by the seat of Ellison’s (and everyone else’s) pants. One early employee, Stuart Feigin, reminisced via video how when Bank of America, which Ellison was approaching for a start-up loan, demanded a balance sheet, neither he nor Ellison knew what one was.
“We had to go and study some annual reports to figure it out,” he said.
Feigin, who worked at Oracle for 20 years and is now a venture capitalist, also recalled stuffing all of Oracle’s early receipts into a shoe box.
Safra Catz was not chosen to be Oracle’s first accountant because, unlike the other candidate, according to Ellison, “she didn’t have a car.”
At an early meeting with a firm bidding to become Oracle’s European sales representative, Ellison recalled discovering “that they were trying to hide the fact that they were a four-person company, while we had been trying to hide the fact that we were a seven-person company.”
Unlike Google Inc., which is known for fetishizing its employees’ academic records to the point of asking middle-aged candidates what their college grades were, Ellison — himself a college dropout — touted Oracle’s unconventionality.
“It was well-known that we were an MBA-free zone,” he said. “I am only half-kidding.”
That’s news to them
The keynotes were interspersed with skits by former and current Saturday Night Live cast members, including Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson and Darrell Hammond.
One of the better jokes was a quip by Hammond, playing a CEO of a company facing an Oracle takeover bid.
“Take off your gas masks. Oracle never uses tear gas on the first opportunity,” he said to his employees, cowering under the table.
Nealon, who played a news anchor for many years on SNL, joked in his deadpan delivery that “OpenWorld faced a slowdown today after a strange package appeared on Ellison’s doorstep. It was from Santa Clara and from an Alfred Chuang.”
Chuang is cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems, a middleware vendor that Oracle offered last month to buy for $6.7 billion. BEA is holding out for a higher price.
The biggest clunker was a skit where the CIA, an Oracle customer, tried get into the Oracle building in order to give Ellison a birthday cake. It led to a painfully obvious touting of the security of Oracle’s software, for which it continues to get heavy criticism.
Ellison, self-deprecating?
One of the bigger surprises may have been the extent of the self-deprecation from Ellison, who was in a jovial mood.
He admitted that Version 6 of Oracle’s database “had a problem: It didn’t work … very well.” He attributed that in part to the introduction of the predecessor of one of Oracle’s better-known features, Real Application Clusters (RAC).
“It was computer science as much as software development that we were doing,” he said.
Ellison also took blame for Oracle’s near-demise in 1991, when the company had its first-ever money-losing quarter and Ellison was told by his CFO that company teetered on bankruptcy.
“I drove the company into a brick wall at 150 miles per hour,” he said.
Ellison has made comments in which he appeared to personalize defections by top lieutenants and target their subsequent companies with extra glee. Two companies that Oracle has acquired, Siebel Systems Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc., were headed by former Oracle executives, Tom Siebel and Craig Conway, respectively.
None of that was in evidence Sunday night. He called the namesake customer relationship management firm that Siebel founded “a brilliant success.” And he called former President Ray Lane “the best field guy in the United States” at the time he hired him and credited Lane with leading Oracle to $10 billion a year in revenue by the late 1990s.
“Sunday Night Live” was dedicated to Oracle’s late cofounder, Bob Miner.
Ellison hailed all of Oracle’s current and former employees.
“From the bottom of my heart, without you, we would have nothing,” he said.
Ellison, snarky (All’s right with the world)
Still, Ellison couldn’t resist taking shots at database competitors Oracle has left behind.
“With Oracle 5, we demolished Ingres. With Oracle 7, we demolished Sybase,” he said.
Oracle today posts $20 billion a year in revenue from its 300,000 customers.
Catz’s speech was briefer. She touted Oracle’s humanitarian efforts, which include supporting 1,600 nonprofit organizations in 37 countries.
This year’s OpenWorld runs until Thursday. Outside of the thousands of conference sessions, the conference features concerts from Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and Lenny Kravitz.
