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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (28660)	7/24/2000 6:27:25 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 54805

It is not the way you or I would run a force, but it does work for many companies. They put a guy in as manager, tell him his sales goal, and don't care how he meets it. If you are a company like ORCL, in its marketplace the last 10 years, you can get away with it. Things are so turbulent that almost anything goes. It's like the guy trying to sell another guy in the "Biz" here. 1) "You are lying to me!" 2) " I know, I know, but listen to me!"

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (28660)	7/24/2000 7:15:22 PM
From: sditto	Respond to of 54805

Over the last 10+ years, ORCL sales have been far short of the smooth hockey stick you see in business plans: Year Ending Sales Increase May-00 $10,130 15% May-99 $8,827 24% May-98 $7,144 26% May-97 $5,684 35% May-96 $4,223 42% May-95 $2,967 48% May-94 $2,001 33% May-93 $1,503 28% May-92 $1,179 15% May-91 $1,028 6% May-90 $971 In both GG and LOFTL, Moore talks at length about the different sales and marketing styles needed at each point in the technology adoption life cycle. IMHO, the ORCL sales organization “grew up” in a tornado and used heavy handed sales techniques and even false reporting along the way to try and extend the tornado results rather than transitioning onto Main Street. Despite seemingly annual sales reorganizations they do not seem to get it right. The fact that ORCL continues to profit is a tribute to the sustaining nature of a Gorilla in an enabling technology market. More year-by-year detail for anyone interested: - ORCL rose to prominence in the mid-1980s by adopting IBM SQL (standard query language) as their database query tool and then customizing their database to run on all the different hardware and software platforms provided by the emerging minicomputer vendors - As their database product effectively became the de facto standard, ORCL experienced hypergrowth and reported annual sales growth in excess of 100% - In 1988, ORCL competitors RTI and Informix reported much slower sales but ORCL reported continued growth despite signs management may not have been up to the task of managing hypergrowth - In 1990, ORCL unexpectedly reported a loss which resulted in both management and board changes coupled with an accounting restatement for the last two years - In the early 1990s, ORCL sales slowed drastically during and after the Gulf War recession and then began to pick up with the emergence of client/server computing and packaged applications - By the mid-1990s, database sales accelerated as vendors such as Peoplesoft and SAP selected ORCL as their underlying database of choice - In 1994, ORCL began to see sales success of their own packaged financial applications - In 1996 and 1997, ORCL sales stumbled again in the wake of an unsuccessful sales organization realignment which also alienated resellers, slumping database sales during the rollout of 8i, onset of the "Asian Flu" in the critical Japanese market, industry interest in object oriented technology from a seemingly revitalized Informix, and Ellison's fascination with the Network Computer - In 1998, the industry declared the NC dead, Ellison began to focus significant time an energy on adapting ORCL products for the coming Internet world, and ORCL management moved to fix the sales and reseller problems in the face of mounting competition from IBM on the high end and MSFT on the low end - In 1999, database sales and margins from corporate clients began to sag in front of Y2K while database sales to e-companies and the web enabled ERP and CRM applications portfoilo began to take off at the expense of most major competitors - In 1999, ORCL also began to "eat its own dog food" by initiating a long overdue revamp of it's internal MIS capabilities to institute better and more timely reporting while saving $1B+ in operational costs

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (28660)	7/25/2000 10:27:33 AM
From: areokat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

The reason I mention this is because you're only one of many people who've characterized Oracle's sales force much as you did. You might be right about the pressures the sales team is under, but I disagree with you about that sort of behavior being symptomatic of a great sales force. Mike. I'm not disagreeing with you but might part of the sales force effectiveness be affected by the stage of the market oracles is in i.e. tornado vs. main street. When the business is in hypergrowth Larry's insistence on making the sales numbers is actually good strategy (we may not agree with his methods). And lets not forget his focus, he is intent on surpassing softie in the software business and becoming number 1. His execution of the billion-dollar cost cutting effort is on target and producing bottom line results, much to the amazement of many of his detractors. If you've got gorilla power nothing says it is going to be used in a fair and equitable manner. As we have recently seen all sorts of external forces are attacking gmst, qcom, msft, and csco. If you’re the gorilla and you have the chance isn't it expectable that you hit back when you can. I'd love to see Porter analyze the orcl situation and its competitive advantage. Again, I don't disagree with what you say about the effects of oracles actions long term or what LindyBill and others have said about oracles current capabilities. What I do see is it's a gorilla and according to TRFM gorillas can survive even poor management. It has market share and with market share it has power over its value chain that can be used to further oracles objectives at the expense of the members of the value chain which Moore (LOTFL) indicates is sometime a painful but proper use of gorilla power. JTO of an oracle holder. Tom