I am excited to start a new series of interviews with tech executives who have seen the industry evolve over a minimum of two decades. They have helped analyze, envision, develop and take to market some of the most influential technology the world has seen. And they have done it well mile after mile as elite athletes do. I am honored they spend the time with me reminiscing and star-gazing.
Kicking the series off is John Wookey, who has been a senior product executive in the technology industry for more than 35 years. He started with Accenture (when it was still the consulting division of Arthur Andersen) and has worked for some of the largest software vendors in the industry, including Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.
Part 1 of the interview focuses on the past and present. Part 2 will focus on his view of the future of the industry.
35 year career arc
It's interesting to see my career arc from the time when computers were relatively nascent in the business world. The big banks had them. Big insurance companies had them. But computers were just starting to move into mainstream business. When I started with Accenture, which in those days, was the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, you went to up to St. Charles training center. You were still using punched cards. I never worked on mainframes, I never did card punch but they still trained you on it.
It's kind of hard to envision that today, given consumers walk around with computers in their pockets. The thing that I always say has changed the most is not the technology, what's really changed is the audience and the customers we are creating it for. You go from a world of which people had never touched them before, and frankly were a little terrified by them. And you did everything you could to sort of emulate paper systems they had before, to where now in the business world, expectations for enterprise software are largely driven out of the individual's experiences using consumer technology. Which is very individual-centric, very adaptive to their work styles. And enterprise systems are trying to keep up.
So, that to me is the most interesting thing in these 35 years is how fundamentally different the customers, the users, the audiences change for the systems that we're building. And now whether it's your customer or your employer, your partner, the systems you are creating are very likely being tested against consumer grade software that we never envisioned when we were building enterprise systems even a dozen years ago. And that affects industry trends , how existing companies rarely make that transition smoothly, but it gives an opportunity to a host of new companies to grow up and become the new leaders. Inflection points
Emerging technologies tend to come into the industry in two phases. There's a phase of incremental improvement. The technology is applied to existing products to provide incremental improvement. And then there's a much bigger breakout phase where people go back to first principles, they rethink the problem space they are trying to address. And they take advantage of the technology in a way that is more than some incremental change on what exists, but really allows them to embrace break through thinking and deliver break out, industry changing products.
So each of these technology shifts tends to come with a shake up in the industry. Oracle became the leader because they showed an entirely new model for persistence through relational technology replacing old ISAM, flat file systems. SAP was the one which capitalized on the shift to client server with PeopleSoft doing the same thing on the HR side. Salesforce with the shift to the cloud, attacked the CRM market and exploited some challenges in that space.
And whether it was Larry Ellison really thinking about technical architecture and the importance of integration between the database, the middle and the application, or it's what Salesforce has done with a vision of multi-tenant cloud. - this idea of the same version of the software which everybody uses, whether you're a five person non-profit or the largest financial services firm in the world.
The idea that all of those organizations own the same piece of software and every four months they get a new version of it is a pretty radical idea. If you told people 15 years ago, you're going to run on the same software as people who have very little in common with you from a requirements standpoint, they would have said you were crazy. They would say "I have to have my own control. I want to run my own systems". But the ability to continually innovate, and move the technology forward and change in incremental value for the subscriptions that they're paying, is possible because there's only one version of software that Salesforce maintains and can continually move forward.
Working with some of the industry's best
I was lucky in that I've worked with and for some amazing people in the industry like Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff and also Jim Snabe at SAP. Jim is not as well known as Marc or Larry, but an excellent leader, very strong on the technology side, as well as being a strong manager. All of these leaders see the shift in these technologies early and move on them.
So, again I've been fortunate to have worked at each of these great companies. While each are in the same industry, I learned different lessons at each of them.
Oracle taught me a number things and I was lucky to learn many of them from Larry directly....things about technical architecture. And the importance of singularity in a technology model. And a vision for a technology. Because he understood that technology is constantly evolving and if you can keep it as simple and consistent as possible, it's much easier to adapt when things change, which they always do.
SAP to me, I think has always done an amazing job of really understanding the sales process in this industry. And then they couple it with a very strong service model, so SAP was outstanding in that, no matter what issue a customer had, any where in the world, the executives always made it a priority to be there to understand the problem and to help them address it.
And then I think Salesforce in addition to what they've done for the technology standpoint also understands the importance of the message and telling the story and helping organizations understand how this technology links to the business problem that they have, and then step back and put it in a broader context.
So, the whole idea of no software, that was kind of the tagline, but I think it told an important story that the software is never really meant to be what you were buying, what you were trying to buy was a better way to run your business. And I don't think anyone in the industry has a better ability than Marc, to help people understand it by using the power of his words and the message, to really deliver that.
So, I've been so fortunate in my career to work with, for and around great leaders But my greatest joy has really been the teams that I've been able to work with....and in many cases to help build those teams. For me, the joy was always in the creation of the team and the development of the team and seeing the team be successful.
The teams that built our industry solutions at Salesforce were great. I had an amazing industry team there, great industry leaders, great product managers, great engineers, great marketing people, and we operated with a single set of objectives and priorities and we pulled together.
This idea that you create something new inside of a company, and you are able to have an impact on the company, but also have an impact on the customers who are buying the products, you end up building a closer relationship with half of the organization, I think is really magical.
What's funny, is that you often don't really appreciate it while you're in the middle of it all, sometimes, you've got all this stress, and the day to day, and budget constraints and all the problems you work through, but when you look back on it, you say, I felt every week, every month, every year, becoming stronger as a team, executing better, then you get this amazing sense of satisfaction. And I've been lucky to have that experience at Salesforce, and SAP, and Oracle and all the way back to Ross Systems.
At Oracle, the last few years I was there when I was running the applications division, the acquisitions were tough. Acquiring People Soft, this was not a company that wanted to be acquired. It was a pretty stressful time but I was proud in the end that I built a management team that had great leaders....yes from Oracle, but also from PeopleSoft, and J.D.Edwards. We had a management team that it wasn't "yours" or "mine" but "ours". We all sat down every week in staff and talked about how we going to beat SAP. How do we become the number one software company in the application software company in the world?
And how do we do that using the combined expertise and the best Applications we have across Oracle, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards and how we build a new thing that we're going call Fusion?
Those to me, are always the magical moments, when you create the teams that work together that everyone feels that sense like when you're, if you've ever rowed crew, there's a feeling when you're part of an eight man team and you're pulling on the oars. If you all pull together perfectly, there's a sense of effortlessness in what you're doing, like you were accelerating with almost no effort. So those to me, are always the high points, is that sense of team.
The low points are kind of the same. Usually somehow related to hubris in my thinking with the plan was, and not listening to people that work for me. I'm lucky there haven't had too many of those. But whenever I look back on bad experiences, it's always because of the fact that in the end, I got to point where I felt I was the only one that had the right answer and I didn't listen to my teams or my peers or my bosses.
