The Story of Oracle: Part Two

We're going to continue that with this episode. We will not finish the Oracle story with this episode because the company has been around for a while and it's there's been a lot of things that have happened with Oracle, both good and bad, and so we're going to really dive into some of the more tumultuous years at Oracle.

The the period of the nineties were really really big for Oracle's history, very important years, years where Oracle could have gone away if things had turned out slightly differently. And also just as a reminder that we're going to published tech Stuff more frequently for a little while, at least kind of doing an experiment, you guys are going to get episodes on a much more frequent basis. They might be a little shorter, but you're going to be

getting them a lot more frequently. So we're excited about this. I can't wait to really experiment with it and see how it works and to hear your guys feedback. Looking forward to all that. But let's jump into Oracle story Part two. Now. In that last episode, I mentioned that Oracle had made a bit of a boo boo in n which is an understatement. It was a problem that had some people wondering if the company that had been on a meteoric rise was going to be on the

verge of collapse. So what was going on? Well, it turned out that the company had been regularly misreporting revenues for the fiscal year that ended on May thirty one, for at least three quarters, because the first quarter of that year apparently there were no problems, but for at least three quarters the company had made errors, which led some people this aspect that people were purposefully misrepresenting their

earnings in an effort to drive up Oracle stock prices. Now, that was a charge that executives at Oracle flatly denied. They said this was not intentional. It was not at all a case of us trying to inflate the stock price. But what was going on was definitely a little hinky. There were instances of the company recording orders as actual sales, So imagine that you walk up you're a salesman and

or a salesperson, I should say you're a salesperson. You walk up to a potential client, you have a discussion with that client, and you have a handshake that says the client's really gonna think about purchasing your product, and you go back and you record that as an actual sale. Well, that would be disingenuous because the client has not really put any money forward, they haven't agreed to anything, so for you to call that a sale to boost your

numbers would be unethical. Part of the allegation were that that was what was going on with Oracle, although Oracle said no, it wasn't intentional. It was that we had these, uh, these promises to purchase our products that were being counted as sales because it was all taken in good faith,

but no sale had yet taken place. And there were other examples of clients apparently being double billed, such as when a client would pay for an upgrade and Oracle would issue a new invoice for support services without canceling the old support services invoice from before the upgrade, So essentially this client is being invoiced twice for support services. Now they shouldn't have to do that, because while you are upgrading and you have to pay for the upgrade,

the support services should remain pretty much steady. So you would cancel the old invoice, use the new invoice to indicate this is for the upgrade services. But you wouldn't build the client twice. You wouldn't continue to give them support for both the old version and the new version,

so that was an issue. There are also cases of clients who had returned products to Oracle for a refund, and the company just never canceled out the sale in their own records, so while they were returning money to the clients in their records, that sale was still existing on a ledger somewhere as being legitimate instead of being a return. So there were multiple instances of Oracle having sales on the books that did not actually exist in the real world, and so the numbers were not matching up.

The reported revenues and the actual profit were way out of alignment. You would look at the sales and say, well, according to this, we made you know, fifty million dollars in sales, but when we look at the actual profits, they're very, very low. So there's a huge disconnect here because either our expenses went out of control or the revenues that we've uh indicated in this sheet are not

really accurate. So some shareholders were noticing these problems as early as March nine, and they began to file lawsuits against Oracle, some of which became class action lawsuits. So how could this have happened without it being purposeful? Well, the sales environment at Oracle in the late eighties and early nineties was incredibly aggressive, something that Larry Ellison, one of the co founders of Oracle, had himself encouraged. Now according to a book written by Karen Southwick, it's a

book titled Everyone Else Must Fail. The Unvarnished Truth about Oracle and Larry Ellison, sales at Oracle depended upon representatives making aggressive quotas, both to earn sweet commissions and to avoid being at the bottom of a widely circulated list. So those commissions were a big incentive driver. If you hit your quota, you would get a certain percentage of those sales on commission. If you went above your quota, if you sold more than what your quota was asking for,

you got an even bigger commission. For all additional sales. So if you made three million dollars in sales, you would get a decent commission. And if you did another million dollars of sales on top of that, on top of your quota, you would make a bigger commission and actually make more money off of that fourth million than you did off the first three million combined. So there was a real incentive to go out there and very aggressively try to sell Oracles products. On top of that,

there was this list I was telling you about. Well, the sales team was originally led by a guy named Mike sea Scholls, who headed sales until nineteen six. That's when Larry Ellison fired him to replace him with Gary Kennedy. Now, Gary Kennedy had previously been a direct report to Mike sea Schell, so he was uh under Mike sea Schell in the hierarchy. But Kennedy was an incredible salesperson, like he was just out selling Sea Schell quarter after quarters.

So eventually Ellis said, why do I have you working under this other guy. You're clearly outperforming him. You should have his job. So he fires Mike Siechel and then promotes Gary Kennedy to Siechell's job. Now, Kennedy would create a list every quarter and he would rank all the salespeople in his department according to how well they met their respective quotas. Being at the bottom of the list was really not good, and if you showed up more than a couple of times, you were likely on the

way out now. According to Anneka seal A, who was the twelve person ever hired at Oracle, she was a salesperson there, She said that people would tend to leave on their own before they were asked to go or they were fired, because if they showed up at the bottom of the list a few times, their morale was shot and they would essentially quietly quit and leave the company.

Kennedy's second in command was a guy named Craig Ramsey, who later said he felt that this particular strat g backfired on the company and that ranking people like that in a way to try and reward top performers was actually really just punishing the people at the bottom of the list beyond measure. It was discouraging them, and it was sabotaging their efforts to do better moving forward, because you would freak out so much about being at the

bottom of the list. You would end up creating a self fulfilling prophecy of failure, and you would end up failing out of Oracle. Not necessarily getting fired, but you would be so shaken by the experience because there's so much pressure on you to perform, that you were more likely to just leave the company. The point I want to make here is that the sales environment at Oracle was incredibly competitive and stressful, which may explain how so

many errors were happening. People were trying to hit those numbers, and they were doing this the best they could. Like they would get a promise to purchase products they would put as a sale, so they were essentially robbing future figures to feed into present day figures. So a sale for tomorrow would get recorded today, Now that would mean the next day, when tomorrow comes, you suddenly are down one sale. Now now you're looking ahead of the next day.

So it was this constant game of trying to massage your numbers by looking at all the prospects you had moving forward and incorporating that into the present day. But it was an unsustainable approach, and ultimately it started to get people's attention and people begin to ask what exactly

is going on here. On August nine, Oracle disclosed that it had miscalculated revenues for five quarters, with the most recent quarter ending on May thirty one, nine nine, and they had to restate their revenues to correct the matter, which caused the company's stock value to drop quite a

bit in response. Uh the market lost a lot of confidence in Oracle because restating your revenues something that you had supposedly been disclosing quarter after quarter, and then saying, you know what, turns out those numbers we gave you last year aren't right. That's not great. A bit later in nineteen ninety, Oracle announced that the first quarter of nineteen ninety one, which technically ended on August thirty first, nineteen ninety represented the company's first quarterly loss in revenue

in its history. Oracles fiscal years, by the way, start in June and they end in May, and the company refers to the fiscal years by the end of year, not the start year. So fiscal year nineteen ninety one for Oracle began in June nineteen ninety and ended in May. The end of May, the company reported a net loss of thirty six million dollars in that first quarter of

fiscal year nineteen ninety one. A year earlier, the company had reported earning eleven point seven million, so they went from a profit of eleven point seven to a loss of thirty six million. And Oracle reported this loss despite actually generating more revenue in the first quarter of nine than it had the previous year. So in ninety one, in that first quarter they made two hundred three point eight million dollars in sales. That's not profit, that's in

just revenue. But in n they only made one seventy five point five million. I say only that's a huge number. But the point I'm making is that while Oracle had sold more in the company was actually experiencing a net loss in instead of a profit. So this was not great news. Oracle also announced in nineteen ninety that it was going to downsize by laying off about ten percent of its domestic workforce, and at that time, Oracle had

four thousand employees in the United States. So here was a company that was dealing with a quarterly loss, a hit to stock prices, a ten percent layoff, and charges that the company had at least been negligent and sloppy, if not actually trying to mislead shareholders. So in other words, it was not a good scene. One of the guys who was laid off at that time was a fellow named Gary Kennedy. That was the the head of sales himself.

That was the guy who had kind of encouraged that whole UH environment of cutthroat salesmanship, and so he was let go. He had been the tenth Oracle employee when he started back in nineteen eighty two, but the accounting disaster was one he could not bounce back from and he got his walking papers in. Another person who was important in the sales department was a guy named Tom Siebel, who Gary Kennedy had recruited into Oracle in nineteen eighty four.

Siebel had a reputation for being an extremely effective salesman, and he had reportedly approached Larry Ellison about creating a sales automation product, but Ellison was not interested in hearing about it, so unlike Kennedy, Siebel actually left on his own accord. He quitted the company, and this was after Ellison had turned down his idea for this this UH, this sales automation tool and so he went on to found a new company called c BL Systems, which ended

up going into direct competition with Oracle. This will become a familiar theme. One of the most interesting things I find about Oracle's history is that Larry Ellison has this history of alienating some of his top executives. Whether it's because they were not a good fit for Oracle, or because of personality conflicts, or just because of who Ellison is as a person I cannot speak to, but it is interesting to see how many of them left Oracle to go and either join another company or found a

company that would go into direct competition with Oracle. It's almost as if saying Larry Ellison has upset me so much that I need to try and take him down a notch. That's probably be putting words into other people's mouths, But that's the implication I get, because the story happens over and over again. The following year was more of the same, with more instances of bad accounting piling up.

In fact, Oracle would have to restate its earnings again for the fiscal year ending May thirty first nineteen, So for the year ending nineteen and the year ending nine they had to restate their revenues. Two years in Aurow not good. It was rumored that the board of directors was even considering firing Larry Ellison. But the board was pretty small. In fact, there are only four people sitting on it at the beginning of all this mess. There was Bob Minor, one of the co founders of Oracle.

There was Don Lucas, and there was Arnold Silverman, who would leave the board during this time and would be replaced by a guy named Joe Costello. Joe Costello was brought in specifically as the outsider board member, the idea that this was a guy who could stand up to Larry Ellison because he didn't have any fear of the man. He didn't have any uh he wasn't beholden to him at all, and so Costello and Ellison would end up

facing off against each other quite a few times. Ellison reportedly liked keeping the board small on purpose in order to make it a little bit easier to control them. Ellison was not austed, but one thing was clear. The company had a distinct lack of internal controls and they needed to fix that. They had to find a way to catch and prevent these types of problems moving forward, something had to be done, and I'll talk more about what was done in just a minute, but first let's

take a moment to thank our sponsor. But one of the things that was done in response to all of this controversy was another high profile firing, and that would be of Jeff Walker, who was the chief financial officer for Oracle. He was shown the door. Now, he had been with Oracle since nineteen eighty five, but he had started out off as a software developer. He was not

a financial officer by trade. Uh And in fact, Larry Ellison had apparently said on multiple occasions that you didn't need to have experts in finances, you were a bean counter. And so there were a lot of interesting reports about why Larry Ellison was so hot on having Jeff Walker

as chief financial officer. A lot of the reports suggested that Ellison wanted a person that was really easy to influence, so that he could end up quote unquote controlling Walker and not have someone who was more independently minded and have firmer ideas of how the financials should be handled for his company. Um, which says a lot I think, but I don't know how true. Those accusations are they could just be people who are bitter about Oracle in

general who are casting as versions. I don't know, but the general story was that Ellison wanted Jeff Walker in that position because it was someone else that he could influence. Ellison would defend Walker to the rest of the board while they were all debating on who should replace Walker as CFO, so Ellison was saying, no, we shouldn't get rid of him, we should keep him. Costello, however, was

on the opposite side of this argument. Remember Joe Costello had been brought onto the board during the tail end of all this mess, and he was saying, no, we've got to get somebody who has a background in uh in leading a financial department to become the chief financial officer. That's the only responsible result, that's the only responsible response. Rather, we could have to this. So he said, we're in dire need of a financial expert in the role. We're

gonna look outside the company and find somebody. Ellison was dismissive of this idea. He said, you don't have to be an expert. It's just just numbers. It's easy. The board persisted, and eventually Ellison would back off kind of. After the fall out, there was a lot of blaming going around at Oracle. Ellison largely blamed Gary Kennedy and said his sales strategies were the reason for all the

accounting discrepancies. Kennedy and Siebel, who had both left Oracle at that point, said that Ellison's attitude of anything goes was ultimately to blame. That Ellison set the tone that he said essentially everything is fair game until you get caught. So if you're not caught, you can pretty much do whatever you need to do to get the results you

want to get. That's what they say. Larry Ellison's philosophy was One move the company made to try and right the wrongs was to make a new hire to replace Walker, and Oracle would eventually reach out to Jeff Henley. Henley had served as the chief financial officer of the Pacific

Holding Company. That was a holding company that had a life insurance company underneath it, as well as investment strategy company, brokerage firms, that kind of thing, and according to Costello, Ellison initially try to cut the offer the board was going to extend to Henley. Ellison's like, no, this guy doesn't need that much cut it in half. But the rest of the board stood up to Ellison. They said, no, he really does need this this package in order to

bring him on board to Oracle. We're never going to hire him away otherwise. And it became kind of a battle between Ellison and the rest of the board. Now, Ellison was a majority, well at least not a majority shareholder, but a major shareholder in Oracle. He had a huge amount of cloud because he owned so much of the company. But Costello would not back down, and he kept telling Ellison, no,

we've got to absolutely extend this package. And eventually, uh, Ellison would back down because Costello said, listen, if you don't agree to this, the rest of the board is going to have a discussion about whether or not you're actually fit to lead this company, and you could find yourself out of a job. And at that point Ellison back down and agreed to offer the employment package to Henley, which was pretty attractive. It included half a million shares

in the company just to start off with. Now, Henley began to whip the company into shape right away from a financial responsibility standpoint. He cleaned up the company's practices, He established controls to prevent another disaster like the two previous fiscal years had been. He also had to figure out how to get an inflow of cash into Oracle to keep the business running because they had a hundred

seventy million dollars in outstanding loans and they needed collateral. Well, first, they began to put up its receivables as collateral, but the problem was the receivables weren't entirely reliable as the previous two years had shown, so they needed to find some other means of doing this because again Oracle had been selling future products for present day cash, which is

really just robbing the future to pay the present. So ultimately Oracle was able to get some money from Nipon Steel that's a Japanese steel company that was really interested in making a huge investment in Oracle in return for a essentially a majority share in Oracle Japan that was going to be the the branch that Oracle was opening in Japan. Uh Ellison initially said no to the deal because it was for a a large personage like more than of of Oracle Japan, and Ellison did not want

that to become an issue. And so while the company needed the money. He said, no, I'm not comfortable doing this. So they then renegotiated a plan and came back with an eighty million dollar loan to Oracle and steak in Oracle Japan on behalf of Nipon Steel, and that was the agreement they actually were able to come to terms on and UH. That meant that Oracle could stay in business.

And in fact, people have since said this was a really wise decision on Ellison's part because he was able to maintain control of this company and not hand it over UH. And it must have been really hard to do because Oracle was so desperately in need of cash, but he did not want to invite disaster. Henley would serve as the CFO for Oracle until two thousand four when he would become the chairman for the company, and

he remained in that role until two thousand fourteen. So I'll talk more about what happened in two thousand and fourteen in the next episode. Again, it gets pretty crazy, but then all the executive moves in Oracle get pretty crazy. Oracle reached out to Raymond J. Lane, who had started his career as a salesman for IBM in the nineteen sixties. He had also worked under future presidential hopeful Ross Perot at Electronic Data Systems and then for the consulting firm Booze.

Allen Hamilton's Oracle brought him on to head the sales and marketing efforts at Oracle, and in June he would be named the president of Oracle USA, so the domestic branch of the company. Four years later he would become president and CEO of the whole Dann company. And he gets a lot of credit for helping turn Oracles sales efforts around in the nineteen nineties, and he would serve as president of the company until the year two thousand,

when he would announce his resignation suddenly. And more on that in a bit, because it gets real juicy. At this time, Oracle's international business was actually doing pretty well, so while things at home were a little rough, internationally it was a different story and that helped balance out the problems that the company was facing in the United States, and work continued on the latest version of Oracle database software. Some analysts had pointed out that Oracle was starting to

fall behind on its promised release schedule. It's also good to point out that By the time Gary Kennedy left the company in n Oracle was selling about a billion dollars worth of products sales. But with the addition of Henley and Lane to Oracle's executive leadership team and with Ellison, they essentially became the leaders of Oracle, the stage was

set for that number to increase tenfold. Bob Minor, one of the co founders of the company, left his role as head of product and development at Oracle to become the leader of a spinoff unit focusing on advanced technologies. He did this in nineteen two, but the following year he sadly passed away due to lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. He was fifty two years old and the uh the one co founder to have passed away.

In nineteen three, the company tried to put its accounting fiasco behind it by settling shareholder class action lawsuits and paying a fine that was the result of a complaint from the Security and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The The class action lawsuits cost Oracle about twenty four million dollars to settle, and the SEC fine was more like a

hundred thousand dollars. Henley himself said that that signaled the beginning of a new era with financial controls and a more responsible sales strategy, and Oracle began to recover from its previously precarious position, which is some great alliteration right there,

Analysts agreed. Timothy McCullum, who worked for the company Dean Witter, which is a stock brokerage in securities firm, told The New York Times that Oracle had brought itself back from the precipice and was in a good position to grow again. And that's exactly what the company did. They made a merger move to streamlined business. This was kind of a merger in name. There was a holding company called Oracle Systems Corporation, and then there was the actual operating company

that was called Oracle Corporation. So you kind of had a holding company that was sort of a parent that didn't really do anything. It just was there for financial purposes, and then you had the operating company, this was the actual company that did stuff. The merger was a corporate move to kind of reincorporate the entire entity, to make it one corporation again and reincorporate it in the state of Delaware. And I've I've talked about in previous episodes

why Companies incorporated in Delaware. It's kind of interesting you should look into that Oracle depended upon version seven of its software for a few years. The company had introduced Oracle Version seven in the summer of nineteen two, and the following years saw Oracle update this version several times,

with seven point three shipping in nineteen nineties six. The new features got pretty futuristic for the mid nineteen nineties, including support for biometric authentication and support for video and audio data management. Now I've got a lot more to say about what happened in the mid nineteen nineties to late nineteen nineties at Oracle, but before I do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In ninete, E. Garnett, who was a marketing executive at Oracle, had a falling

out with Ellison. It seems like a common theme throughout the history of Oracle. The two had made plans to create an interactive TV venture, but then, according to Garnett, Ellison called him into his office, canceled the project, and

then fired Garnett. So Garnett went out and founded a venture capitalist investment company, and then he became the acting CEO of a small database company called Ingress or Inger's if you prefer I, N G R E S only one S. So Garnett ended up hiring several former Oracle

executives and developers for this company. So it seems like Ellison was continuing his pattern of alienating people to the point where they would go and join other companies to compete against Oracle, at least that's what it looks like on casual plans. In n Ellison made another trademarked flamboyant prediction at a technology conference in Paris when he proclaimed

that the Internet would make Microsoft irrelevant and kill the company. Now, to be fair, Microsoft has definitely had to pivot with its software offerings because we have seen a slow migration away from native software, but the company still is in decent shape. In Ed Oates, co founder of Oracle, would retire from the company. He had originally told Ellison that he had planned to quit if the company ever grew to ten thousand employees, but he actually stuck around a

bit longer. He resigned once the company had grown to about twenty thousand employees. He went on to buy a business that provided home theater equipment and installation for wealthy clients. Some of those folks included Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Later, he became a board member of a couple of different companies and organizations, and also a guitarist in a band called Chocked In n Oracle eight database premiered at this time, Larry Ellison felt like the next big move in computers

is a trend toward a network computer model. Now, if you listen to my episodes on cloud computing, you might remember I talked a bit about mainframe computers and how you would access those computers through a dumb computer terminal. Now that's not a comment on a terminal's usefulness, but rather the fact that the terminal itself didn't have any computing power. It was just an interface to access the main frame. Ellison felt that the future of computing could

be related to that past version. So I'll explain more in just a second. A network computer is sort of like those dumb terminals for mainframes. You have a computer that can connect to a server over a network connection such as the Internet. The server does all the actual work, so all the programs, all the storage, all of that. It lives on the server, the network computer just becomes your way of accessing it. Again, is a lightweight interface

to get access to that software and that information. Ellison was sure that was the future of computing, which would also mean people would move away from using microcomputers that relied on native software on their machines, which would mean Oracle could become the largest software company in the world, finally toppling its arch rival that would be Microsoft. But while you could argue Ellison was on the right track,

his predictions were a bit premature. Software sales did not slow down, Oracle did not become the dominant player in the software space, and cloud computing applications would remain a few years off before they became a viable industry. Even so, Ellison was onto something. He was just way ahead of his time on this one. In Oracle updated its product to Oracle eight I lowercase I, which had support for

Java and HTTP technologies, meaning it was Web compatible. That same year, Evan Goldberg, who had previously been an employee at Oracle, contacted Larry Ellison about a web enabled customer relationship management product. Ellis and urged Goldberg to work on accounting software first, making it a web accessible product people would subscribe to rather than purchase outright, and so Goldberg did that and he launched net Ledger, which later became

net sweet. I mentioned that in that previous episode about net suite, so this is when that happened. Also, just a little bit later, Mark Bennieoff, who had been working for Oracle for a few years, would leave the company to found Salesforce dot Com, which also got some help both in the form of advice and financial support from Larry Ellison and Salesforce and net Suite would go on into the software as a service game, an area that

Ellison really wanted to break into as well. Something else that was happening around this time was a near death experience. Larry Ellison was participating in a yacht race off the coast of Australia and during the race they encountered a storm, which was not unusual for the area around Tasmania that they were in at the time, but the storm actually

developed into a full blown hurricane. Out of the fifteen yachts that were in the race, only forty four were able to complete the course, and six sailors from various yachts, none of them Ellison's lost their lives in the storm

they drowned. Ellison himself had to hand over control of his yacht to one of the more experienced sailors on the member on his his crew team, and he said that the whole experience gave him a new appreciation for life, and it also seemed to inspire him to take a more direct control of Oracle, which of course led to some more conflict. In two thousand, ray Lane would resign

as president. So remember Lane was the guy who was brought in to shape up the sales and marketing efforts of Oracle, and Henley had joined a little bit earlier to work and fix the financial controls of the company. Lane, Henley and Ellison were the trio who made the instrumental decisions regarding Oracle's direction. So what the heck caused Raymond Lane to resign? Well, if first there was no comment

from Lane. Ellison's public statement was that the resignation was part of a planned transition, But later he would kind of qualify that statement. He said, well, by planned, I mean I had planned to call Lane while Lane was on vacation with his family and planned to announce the resignation for the following Wednesday, which does not really seem like much of a transition plan to me, but there you go. Lane later had a lot more to say

about his resignation. Now, according to him, Ellison had been steadily removing responsibilities from the role of president, and ultimately Ellison wanted to take the title of president away from Lane and fold the title in with CEO. Now, that would leave Lane without a real role at the company, and it would effectively strip him of all his power.

So when Lane asked Ellison, why do you want to do this, Ellison said that he felt having a president and a CEO meant that there were two people with authority, and that would cause confusion about who is in charge. This particular explanation I find absolutely hilarious considering what happens later in oracles history, but I don't want to jump

ahead of myself. Many executives would say that Ellison found the notion of anyone having remotely the same amount of influence that he had over an oracle to be untenable, and that that was the reason Ellison eventually uh confronted Lane over the phone. He didn't confront face to face. He called him while Lane was on vacation, so Lane decided that he would resign rather than go through the process of having all of his responsibilities stripped away from

him and the title taken away from him. He was just two and a half weeks away from having several millions of dollars worth of shares in the company vest, and that was kind of a slap in the face. It was enough for him to potentially consider going into litigation against Oracle. In fact, a lot of executives have sued Oracle after being fired, with the suspicion that the reason, or at least the timing of their firing was to prevent them having more shares in the company vest at

a certain point. But Lane did not go after a lawsuit. He did eventually get those shares, However, he didn't return to Oracle's offices either. A secretary instead would forward all his belongings to his home, so he was pretty much just done with Oracle at that point. Now, a few months after Lane's departure, another executive named Gary Bloom handed

in his resignation. Bloom had been an executive vice president of database Development Activities and he had really hoped to get the role of president and maybe even eventually CEO. He had aspirations of leading Oracle, but Bloom was starting to find that it was difficult to get any face time with Ellison, who was relying more heavily upon an

executive that he had hired recently named Software Cats. Software Cats had joined Oracle in the late nineties, and she was well on her way to becoming a huge influence in that company. Ellison would frequently communicate to others in Oracle through Cats. He would tell Software Cats what he thought, and then she would go on and talk to the various people who were uh involved with whatever it was

Ellison wanted to talk about. Bloom was really frustrated they wasn't getting anywhere, and he was suspicious that he was never going to get to the top leadership position at the company, so he ended up leaving Oracle to become the head of another company called Veritas Now. That same year,

there was a few other shake ups for Oracle. The company released an integrated application suite called eleven I, but it was really buggy, so that made customers pretty upset, and the stock share price fell fourteen percent in the wake of ray Lane's departure. But Oracle story does not end there. There's a bit more to tell and I will go into it when we get to the Oracle

story part three. In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, please let me know what you would like me to cover, whether it's a technology, a person. Maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest host.

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