A day in the life of Ray Lane: "Fast Lane"

There's a big cover story on Ray Lane in the new issue of Industry Week. It's entitled

                           Fast Lane
     Inside Oracle's 93-country, 13,000 employee reorganization

Their reporter followed Ray around Oracle for a day and tells what he saw. "People think I'm crazy, going through the biggest organizational change that Oracle has ever seen, and I'm (still) calling it a temporary organization."

Ray says that the strategic goal of the reorganization is rooted in selling "bundled solutions"--not just software, but consulting and support as well--into industry specific markets. Selling industry-specific solutions is central, he believes, to becoming customer-driven. And with industries becoming more global each day, he says, regionally focused operations will inevitably slide toward obsolescence.

Because of Oracle's tremendous growth in 1984, the number of salespeople who met or surpassed their sales quota is staggering. Equally staggering is the company's 1994 expense for recognition events. More than $10 million for a program highlighted by an all-expenses-paid week at a four-star hotel in Hawaii. Ray would like the cost-per-head of this to come down as a percentage of revenue. "Include this goal in the three-year plan."

"We need a reliable win-loss reporting system. We have to know what the
biggest losses were and why they (account representatives) lost the business, even if that means that we have to sit down and interview the lost customer."

"When you're growing 30%, 40%, 50%, the inclination is to shake your head
and say, "It's working, why change now? Why don't you go ask IBM that?"

Ray explains that while Larry is a visionary, the company had an obvious shortcoming with performance on behalf of the customer. And when Oracle hit the wall in 1990, says Ray, its board told Larry that "you are great at developing technology, but go get someone who can run a business."

"Companies need to have great innovators, but they also have to have
people who know how to deliver...at some point you need to focus much more on professional management, communication, discipline, organization, all of those things."

This is quite a useful article and worth reading a few times.

Mike Willett, EE
Storage Computer Corp.
11 Riverside Street
Nashua, NH 03062
Tel. 603-880-3005

::I/O-accelerated, very fast disk arrays for all SCSI systems to 1,000 GB:: Received on Fri Jan 13 1995 - 04:17:14 CET