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Larry Ellison steps down as Oracle CEO

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Jesus, this man is rich as fuck

Larry Ellison, CEO of multinational software company Oracle, is leaving his position as CEO effective immediately. According to the company's official statement, Larry Ellison will continue to work for the company as its Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

In his stead, Oracle executives Mark Hurd (formerly of HP) and Safra Katz will take over as co-CEOs. Oracle's statement says that Ellison will continue to be in charge of "all software and hardware engineering functions" in his new role as the company's CTO.

"Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me," said Ellison via the statement. "All the other reporting relationships will

remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future."

Ellison launched Oracle in 1977 with cofounders Bob Miner and Ed Oates as Software Development Laboratories. The company was renamed Relational Software Inc. in 1979, after releasing Oracle Version 2, the first commercial SQL database. The company would not become known as Oracle until 1982. It is perhaps most well-known for its Oracle Database product, an extremely scalable (and extremely expensive) relational database management solution in use at many, if not most, of the world's biggest companies.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/larry-ellison-steps-down-as-oracle-ceo/
 
This co-CEO shit is some next-generation stupid and goes against every theory of strong leadership that has ever been taught, anywhere important. The fuck does the board think this is, La-La Land?

In corporate America, shit falls apart unless there is ONE throat to choke if something goes tits up.
 

FyreWulff

Member
This co-CEO shit is some next-generation stupid and goes against every theory of strong leadership that has ever been taught, anywhere important. The fuck does the board think this is, La-La Land?

In corporate America, shit falls apart unless there is ONE throat to choke if something goes tits up.

Nobody wants high level execs going to their competitors or starting a new competitor anymore
 
Nobody wants high level execs going to their competitors or starting a new competitor anymore
Why would a company like Oracle need to slap that kind of chastity belt on two suits who probably signed non-competes anyway. I know it's not that simple but what's your reason for saying that? Is it a new trend?
 

FyreWulff

Member
Why would a company like Oracle need to slap that kind of chastity belt on two suits who probably signed non-competes anyway. I know it's not that simple but what's your reason for saying that? Is it a new trend?

No competes are illegal in California now AFIAK
 

moist

Member
The Co-CEO thing has got to be a contingency plan for when Mark Hurd has another sex scandal and is forced to resign.
 

ronito

Member
I've worked for partners of Oracle for more than 15 years.

They're in trouble. Taking Ellison out wont fix that.
 

ronito

Member
effective immediately? scandal in-coming or is he just bored of making money?

Larry isn't the "bored of making money" kind of guy.
I don't know if there's a scandal that's going to come to light but it might be more a message to shareholders that Oracle's trying to change.
 

ronito

Member
They'll just gobble up another company to play catch up.

The issue is they've gobbled up all kinds of companies and can't make any of it work. I mean they took over people soft in what, 2002 and Fusion still doesn't really work?

They made a smart buy in Eloqua but really they're just so far behind and really they don't get the cloud stuff. Why would anyone in midmarket want to buy commodity servers at 175k a pop when they can just get that out in the cloud for a fraction of that. Everything that Oracle offers is big and bloated. Sure it does cool stuff but most companies are finding they don't need big and bloated and are willing to forego some functionality for ease of implementation and lower TCO.

They have enough cash to survive. But they've been playing catch up for more than a decade now. They have a few shining stars in their pocket, Eloqua being one, ServiceNow isn't that bad after all. Endeca is pretty cool stuff but they've done a bad job positioning it. But loads of missteps nearly everywhere else. EBS 12 on the cloud is not very mature, their vision of having everything go through Weblogic has largely backfired, moving from Siebel to CX in the way they did was a mistake (they should've leveraged their branding and given those customers an upgrade path to the cloud), they're behind on the columnar database front. They've been stuck in the "big and bloated enterprise software" game for too long and the market has largely turned against them. Elllison might've been the poster boy for that kind of thinking but it's the entire org. Fact is that more and more companies are going 100% cloud in IT and really Eloqua is the ONLY best of breed cloud App that Oracle has. Service now is good but it doesn't have the market share and CX is getting trounced by Salesforce and Workday. So Oracle's nearly completely out of that space which is where everyone is going and the on-prem software business which is Oracle's sweet spot is shrinking rapidly. So changing CEOs isn't going to fix it.

I've been saying for years that Oracle has enough money to eventually figure it out and get it right. But like I just said, I've been saying that for years.
 
This co-CEO shit is some next-generation stupid and goes against every theory of strong leadership that has ever been taught, anywhere important. The fuck does the board think this is, La-La Land?

In corporate America, shit falls apart unless there is ONE throat to choke if something goes tits up.
It's not like Oracle has a complicated decisionmaking tradition.

Will it make us money? Do it.
Can we sue them for money? Do it.
Can we charge more? Do it.
 

Phoenix

Member
It's not like Oracle has a complicated decisionmaking tradition.

Will it make us money? Do it.
Can we sue them for money? Do it.
Can we charge more? Do it.

You forgot the most important part of their strategy:

Can we buy someone that already does it and charge more money for what we bought while eliminating all of the talent that made it? Do it.
 
I've only recently started working in a more corporate environment, and we use Oracle. It's slow sometimes, it's bloated sometimes, but I can't deny its flexibility and ability to be customized per company needs.
 

ronito

Member
You forgot the most important part of their strategy:

Can we buy someone that already does it and charge more money for what we bought while eliminating all of the talent that made it? Do it.
And there's also "can I give this functionality a unique name? Yes? charge for it as a different product!"
 

ronito

Member
Just heard that the Oracle CEO said that his goal is to make Oracle a cloud company within 3 years. The do have some really good hardware (the exalytics box) and they own Sun and Java.

But 3 years? Fusion STILL doesn't work.
 

dankir

Member
Just heard that the Oracle CEO said that his goal is to make Oracle a cloud company within 3 years. The do have some really good hardware (the exalytics box) and they own Sun and Java.

But 3 years? Fusion STILL doesn't work.

Well they can join SAP too, because we're going cloud on everything powered by HANA.
 

GungHo

Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
Well they can join SAP too, because we're going cloud on everything powered by HANA.

Regardless of whether or not your customers are ready for it. It's actually the best way to get people off their ass. I wish more companies had those balls.
 

ronito

Member
Well they can join SAP too, because we're going cloud on everything powered by HANA.

That'll be an interesting dynamic. Really I think ON PAPER Oracle should totally trounce everyone in that market. They have the business knowledge, the commodity hardware that no one else has, they have Sun for Linux AND Java, MySQL and the best traditional RDBMS in the market. Don't really see how SAP, NetSuite or others can compete on any front other than their application/business knowledge. But again, that's ON PAPER. Oracle's huge and slow to move. They might never be able to pull it off. We'll see how this goes.
 

ronito

Member
In keeping with prior performance Larry will pay top dollar to bring in players from other teams then as soon as they enter the field for the first time he'll smash their knees with a sledgehammer and then complain that they're not performing when they get destroyed by the other team because he crippled them.

And every 5 years the whole team will need to be reimplemented.
 

tirminyl

Member
This co-CEO shit is some next-generation stupid and goes against every theory of strong leadership that has ever been taught, anywhere important. The fuck does the board think this is, La-La Land?

In corporate America, shit falls apart unless there is ONE throat to choke if something goes tits up.

Co-CEO's is working well for Atlassian which has been growing rapidly for the past 12 years and that is without a sales department as well.
 
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