Oracle's New Strategy Unfolds
LEAD STORY: Oracle's New Strategy Unfolds
Life is all about tradeoffs. Time with kids or answer a few more e-mails? Grab that airport cheeseburger or much on some carrots? Follow the Pittsburgh Pirates or decide to root for a real Major League team?
We assess our needs, evaluate our options, make decisions, and realize that some of those decisions are much more difficult and complex than others.
Well, in that category of difficult decisions, I've got a doozy: You know you're spending too much on infrastructure and maintenance versus growth projects and innovation, and you are committed to changing that. You know your current roster of global systems could serve as an archeological technology museum showcasing every type of hardware, software and network, and you're determined to update all that. And you also know that all CIOs take a sacred oath vowing to love the one-stop-shop IT vendor in theory but to avoid it like the bubonic plague in practice.
And then you hear Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, make a cogent and persuasive argument that provides the answer to all of your problems, including your overly strained budget, your brittle systems, your inability to get out ahead of the busy work, your aging and mismatched applications, and most of all your inability to meet the CEO's expectation that you become a full-time driver of growth and innovation.
Under Phillips' plan, your cost of internal operations plummet, your integration headaches vanish, your performance problems disappear, and your CEO views you as a business leader who's taken on and overcome a massive and seemingly intractable problem.
But here's the tradeoff: To get all that, you have to standardize on Oracle. The whole stack. Storage to applications. The thing you swore in blood you'd never do.
Phillips' solutions sound almost too good to be true--and perhaps they are. Then again, Oracle's strategy and Oracle's technology are unlike anything else in the IT industry today, due to their breadth and ability to extend from systems to storage to middleware to OLTP to databases and ERP and vertical-market expertise.
Table of Contents
2 Oracle's Phillips Says Standardizing On Oracle Is The IT Cure
6 Phillips Says 22% Annual Fees Are Great For CIOs
9 Oracle's Larry Ellison Declares War on IBM and SAP
14 Oracle's Dazzling Profit Machine Threatened by Rimini Suit
17 Larry Ellison's Nightmare:
10 Ways SAP Can Beat Oracle
22 Oracle's Larry Ellison Mixes Fiction with Facts on SAP
25 Oracle, SAP, and the End of Enterprise Software Companies
28 10 Things SAP's Co-CEOs Should Focus On
31 Oracle Sues Rimini Street for "Massive Theft"
33 In Oracle Vs. SAP, IBM Could Tip Balance
About the Author
Bob Evans is senior vice president and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO, where he's responsible for content strategy and execution and audience engagement.
Prior to jumping into this start-up position in November 2008, he was SVP and editorial director of TechWeb, which includes such brands as InformationWeek, Interop, Web 2.0 Expo, Black Hat, and other online and face-to-face products. Before that, Evans was editor-in-chief of InformationWeek for eight years, during which time the publication became the undisputed leader in the business-technology field in revenue, readership, circulation, market share and market authority.
He is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a frequent speaker at industry events and universities.
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Thread View | Flat View | 5Comments |
 interesting commentsComment by basicuser22 May-24,2010 12:58:31 AMI found this very interesting. thanks for sharing your comments.Reply |
Re: What problem does this solve exactly?Comment by lroder780 May-23,2010 10:56:38 AMEase of use? Doubtful. Managing that many disparate parts well, even under one umbrella, simply doesn't work in practice.Reliability? Again, doubtful. Specialization has historically demonstrated a far better value proposition than generalization.Cost? Highly unlikely. Its completely counterintuitive to argue that removing competition will reduce cost.Innovation? Not a chance.I have said it before and say it again, the hw/sw industry has been around for so long, its time for a true paradigm shift. Reheating the same old strategies as a systems/software vendor and trying to pass them off as a gourmet dish is downright embarrassing.Come on fellas. Show us something to get excited about! Cloud computing is intriguing. Open source holds promise - most significantly because it shifts supplier profitability from hardware/software to service, where it should be at this point in the game.How aboutReply |
Can you trust Larry Ellison and the Oracle gang you haave depend uponComment by hsidhul4e May-23,2010 10:54:08 AMThis has been tried before and did not work does not mean it can not work now. Problem is not with solution. Only problem with this solution is Larry EllisonReply |
 Oracle finds IBM's Playbook from the '70'sComment by ANON1245368236523 May-23,2010 10:47:50 AMThe reason CIOs avoid this practice like the plague is that they have genetic markers that their predecessors implanted from when IBM ran this strategy from the '70's, forward. What you got with IBM was ease of operating very safe, mediocre systems. Good luck with the Oracle "lock-in".Reply |
 Oracle's land and expand methodology will be very expensiveComment by ANON1245368236523 May-23,2010 10:50:42 AMOracle tends to be a very expensive and insensitive vendor that does not look out for the best interests of its customers. Just talk to some of the large Telecom companies in arbitration with Oracle. Lots of breach of contract suits and arbitration.Reply |
