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Larry Ellison, master of his ship, charts Oracle through turbulent times
AS WE CLOSED in on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, we lost the city. Driving into a thick, rainy mist, the diesel buses throttled past some very serious security guards and into the former military base. Squinting through the fog, the Bay Bridge was just a string of pearls against the darkness. At one end of the parking lot, searchlight pods gyrated, sending long white beams dancing and disappearing into the low fog. Oracle OpenWorld. Barenaked Ladies. Sumptuous food, drinks, henna tattoos, and fortunes told.
Festivities at the big "Appreciation Night" party during Oracle's annual conference and trade show hardly displayed any strains of a tough 2001. Not immune to the global economic slowdown, Oracle would later announce that in its fiscal second quarter, profits dropped 12 percent, while new software licenses fell 27 percent. "We are assuming we hit the bottom," Jeff Henley, chief financial officer, would say.
But at Oracle OpenWorld (OOW), the band - yes, Barenaked Ladies - played on. Not surprisingly in this time of turmoil, attendance was down; everyone had stories to tell about their travel ordeals. Animal passions and madcap revelry were less evident, but then again, none of us are getting any younger. Yawning and sated, many were seen headed for the buses well before it all ended. Glory days, have they passed us by?
At sessions on 9i database, application server, and portal products, attendees seemed as intense as ever. Sessions on Real Application Clusters (RAC), the company's biggest technology announcement of 2001, drew some hungry crowds. The trade show floor was a little less crowded than last year, but it still featured an impressive array of software, hardware, storage, networking, and service providers. Intel, talking "macroprocessing," had a major presence at the show; Oracle announced that it was in the process of porting its 9i database server to the IA-64 microprocessor platform. Just down the lane were Sun Microsystems ("no hard feelings"), Hewlett-Packard, and (sigh) Compaq Computer Corp. EMC Corp., the struggling king of storage, sent its executive chairman, Michael Ruettgers, to give an upbeat keynote. To borrow Oracle's new marketing slogan, the big platform vendors' interest in getting their message in...