Larry Ellison is one enterprise software exec I have not spent much time with. Oh, I have seen plenty of Oracle OpenWorld and other keynotes. I mean in a small group setting. He has always let Ray Lane or Charles Phillips or Mark Hurd deal with industry analysts - he spends a bit more time with Wall Street analysts.
And yet over the years, I have learned and admired so much of what he has done for sailing, tennis, hospitality, education, aviation, automobile, sartorial and other worlds. In a way, I am glad we don't spend much time with him - I would bug him with all kinds of questions about these activities.
Alas, we cannot ignore the less exciting world of enterprise software. One of Larry's strengths is that he has cultivated a pithy look and feel to Oracle branding. His taunting of competitors on Oracle earning calls continues that trademark marketing. To me, it's a version of the Avis "we try harder" positioning. It is a way of associating yourself with whoever is a market leader - Microsoft one day, Salesforce or Workday another day, more recently Amazon and SAP. As an added bonus, hopefully, that gets under the skin of those competitors and has them waste time and effort to prove he is wrong.
He spent 1,901 words in his prepared comments and more in the Q&A on SAP in last week's earnings call. More specifically, he named names - what he says are customers who have moved/are moving away from SAP applications to Oracle's. And he took out a microscope to measure the distance between where Gartner places both vendors on various Magic Quadrants. That may have SAP scampering for weeks to respond. And I suspect Gartner analysts and customer attorneys to speculate which specific modules and which global subsidiaries he was referring to.
Missed opportunity - especially since in relative terms, Larry does not spend much time talking about his applications. We are in early 2021, still in the middle of a global pandemic. Very few customers meddled in 2020 with their big, hairy, legacy applications. From what I can tell, there were not many moves to next-gen SAP ERP nor to next-gen Oracle.
Instead, I would have liked Larry to talk about which vertical edge applications Oracle delivered to help his customers morph and survive in a "from-home" and pandemic economy. Telemedicine in health care, distance learning in higher education, mobile banking, PPP loan processing. vaccine management, HR diversity analytics, virtual real estate tours, remote field service, digital mortgages, eCommerce, warehouse automation, last mile delivery and so much more in every industry. Further, I would have liked to hear how Oracle services and his SI ecosystem have moved to virtual delivery. What has Oracle learned from autonomous database deployments that can be applied to application management?
I would love to have those conversations in a small group setting with Larry. Nice bonus would be to have him talk about technology in this year's America's Cup, sustainability on his island, Japanese culture and so much else:)
