CEO Larry Ellison says he's aiming for a "GE culture" that ruthlessly watches expenses, makes decisions quickly, and keeps margins high. Larry provides some insights about the acquisition,future directions and industry developments. Excerpts with edits and comments:
18 months of thinking helped plan the Peoplesoft acquisition and merger well.A lot of things were done in 30 days, including integrating the two salesforces. The secret to these mergers is to make the hard decisions and move quickly. The problem with a lot of mergers in the tech industry is they're not real mergers. People don't eliminate duplication of effort. We wanted to get the economies immediately. We watch how GE does it. They have a clear plan and rapid decision-making. We watch every penny. That's really what makes us different from our Silicon Valley brethren. We're really trying to build a GE culture that watches expenses ruthlessly.
On threats from open-source software : MySQL [an open-source database] is not terribly threatening to us. Open-source software wins if it's better, or if it gets a lot of support from the industry. The Apache Web server beat Microsoft because it was better. Linux has had a lot of support from IBM , Oracle, Intel, and Hewlett Packard .MySQL has no similar support from the industry. They'll hurt Microsoft, in the low end of the database market, long before they'll hurt us. In the Tech industry the strong are getting stronger, and the weak are getting weaker.
On what he calls the "consolidation phase" in the software industry: The entrepreneurial phase was very interesting. But the consolidation phase is very interesting, too. I think of this as the GE operational-excellence phase. Alfred Sloan was the consolidator in the auto industry. Ford (F ) had been the early winner, but General Motors got bigger. History repeats itself. It happened in railroads and cars. Now it's happening in software. And there, we're the consolidator. The magic in the software industry is called scale.
In a related WSJ interview, Larry says Oracle is looking "very carefully at targeted acquisitions" to boost its annual earnings growth rate to 20%. He estimated Oracle's internal growth at about 15% and said Oracle is focusing on acquisitions in specific industry segments. He said the continued consolidation of the software industry is inevitable. "The end game looks like a handful of survivors," he said, ticking off his short list of industry winners. "Microsoft is clearly a survivor, Oracle is clearly a survivor, as is IBM, as is SAP. (My views on consolidation are not the same – we may see constellations and ecosystems - but it is a scary thought to think that all applications and products shall come from only these four.Specialised niche applications and very huge volumes of build applications shall continue to thrive in the market)
Category :Emerging Trends
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