Larry Ellison Live

Larry Ellison.... Live and unscripted in conversation with Ed Zander at The Churchill Club, San Jose Sept 21, 2009.

Ed Zander choose Larry for the tonight’s gig, because he's still in the hunt, he started Oracle on $2000. Hit the wall in 1980's recovered and competed fiercely with Microsoft for leadership on SQL Relational Database performance. After consolidating the ERP applications space (PeopleSoft, Seibel, 30+ more) Oracle is now the 2nd largest software company in the world (an amazing record).

I learned Larry was head of engineering from day one and 32 years later, he’s still head of Engineering at Oracle today. From time to times he’s run other functions, but only until he found the right leaders to head up other functions. Under his leadership Oracle is now the World’s second largest ERP applications company. But as I learned at last week’s SAP World Day 2009 conference in same room in the same Fairmont, ERP has fallen off Moore’s Law.

SAP looked pretty much the same 10 years ago. The biggest innovation seemed to be Timeless Software, the ability of SAP version 7 to accept upgrade packs without ripping out and replacing the complete system. Exact Software’s SMB ERP apps have had Timeless Software for years (Arco van Nieuwland ACM 2005)

Meanwhile Google and the iPhone doing innovation in the consumer space have rapidly brought new innovations in productivity to people doing business bypassing the corp IT police. For example 8 major technology companies including Microsoft, Samsung, and Nokia are in the process of opening up App Stores to entice app development on their platforms. Roger McNamee a prominent Silicon Valley investor helped steer Palm to develop the Palm Pre identified as mega shift to the wearable PC mobility experience, and now business apps are running in the Cloud.

Knowing Larry Ellison’s passion for competitiveness, evidenced in his reputation for driving the top performing relational DB, the Americas Cup and Oracles ferocious reputation. Why does Larry buy SUN at this time in his career?

Yes - I was attending, to get insight into how Larry intends to steer Oracle to the kind of growth Google and Apple have experienced. Must be his goal - right!

Larry made the claim that Oracle regularly beats SAP but mostly admires Tom Watsons IBM. That after beating IBM at Software wants SUN to complete with IBM on hardware. He played both ends of the Cloud calling VC on Sandhill Road nitwits for not gripping that Cloud companies run like Google run on hardware and awesome engineering. That many visions for ERP in the Cloud are vapor; he ribbed Salesforce.com, saying there latest technology invention was Fuchsia. Also that Oracle can provision ERP on demand today – (in the Cloud, if you like).

I gathered than many people at the event also wanted to know why Oracle wants to acquire SUN. Based on the conversation with Larry and people at the dinner table, the reason is clear. To get ERP back on to Moore’s law by quietly making adjusts to the SUN technology stack and Java in particular (many of Oracle’s ERP apps, are Java apps).

For all the megalomaniac bravado and careful posturing, I don’t believe Larry said more than he needed to say. Further Larry announced Oracle just did a 5 year plan, and he will continue to head up engineering. My conjecture Oracle has 30-40 Java ERP apps many routed in Client Server d architecture, how better to move these apps to the next major architrecture more efficiently than by nurturing the Java / SUN technology stack.

I asked Larry an audience question about opening up the ERP BOM in the same way Google has opened up Google docs. He gave a sales marketing answer. That Oracle can server up ERP on demand today. Afterwards, I asked Ed Zander (Larry departed smartly). Ed said Larry was not going to publically answer my question. He needs to sell ERP licenses today. I think Oracle buying SUN starts a 5 year race. Who can transform ERP from flatline growth to Moores Law growth.

My conjecture is before Larry passes then baton, Oracle comes out with a transformational ERP suite in the Cloud.

Check back in 5 years?