Michelle,
You certainly have the right to provide your comments about Lane, Henley or anyone else at Oracle; I would never try to suggest otherwise.
My basic premise is that Lane and Henley are not the key people driving the daily and perhaps even the strategic decisions about Oracle Applications. Ray is primarily the Sales and Operations executive and Henley is the CFO. They certainly contribute to shaping the overall strategy, but the key product decisions are made at a lower level; although Larry now getting very involved in the Applications development organization certainly isn't "lower" level.
Even so, I think that the problem has been more on the sales and implementation side of things than on the product side. Oracle may have missed significant potential along the way; but all the same, they have still gotten themselves to the number two spot after SAP (I'll even concede that it's possibly the number three spot, but I don't yet buy that contention myself). Oracle's applications product set is at least in the ball game from a function/feature perspective.
The key, I think, is to consider Oracle as really being two companies. One is a Product company and the other is a Distribution (including Services) company. When it comes to apps, the Product company may need to make some improvement, but I think that the bigger shortcoming appears to be with the execution on the Distribution side. This is what you have probably seen when reflecting on your Dell experience.
I believe that the earlier management comments about the lousy Q2 FY98 results attributed to the sales force reorganization is correct. Turning that mess around has taken some time and will probably take some more.
In reading your comments about how to fix things leading to the "Peoplesoft culture" conclusion, I could not help but think that you have also basically described the Oracle culture, at least on that limited number of factors. The possible key difference between Oracle and Peoplesoft is an issue of focus. No matter how purely focused the Oracle Apps folks are, they still will have distractions from the overall Oracle organization that Peoplesoft will never have.
I think that this also explains why despite Oracle's presence in other spaces, such as data warehousing, you still have companies like Redbrick (and even Informix and Sybase) hanging in there.
So, back to where the problem lies, for Oracle Applications, I think it sits squarely on the shoulders of the Marketing, Selling and Services leaders/executives that are directly responsible for the Oracle Apps part of the business. Yes, there are probably things that need to be done by the Development folks as well, but I think that a weighting of the factors would generate a much higher coefficient for the non-Development areas in the total equation. The better mousetrap almost never wins just because it's a better mousetrap; it's sales, marketing and service that win the war.
Well, that's just my opinion; take it for what you feel it's worth.
Regards,
Jesse |
