What is a ‘Celebrity CEO’?  When I use the term, I mean “business CEOs whose names are widely known to the general population.”

In my last post, I observed that (at least today, at the largest American-based companies) celebrity CEOs seem to be more prevalent among high-tech companies.  Is there something about high-tech that makes it fertile ground for celebrity CEOs?  I think there is, but it’s more a matter of timing (and today’s business climate) than something inherent in technology companies.

The most obvious class of celebrity CEOs is the Visionary Founder.  Generally, these are people who, through their innovations, have transformed an industry (or created one).  In many cases, their transformations have been much broader.  Following are the famous CEOs people think of in this class:

• Bill Gates – Microsoft
• Steve Jobs – Apple
• Jeff Bezos – Amazon
• Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

Looking back to the list I posted last time, a few of the high-tech CEOs on that list also fit the Visionary Founder description:

• Michael Dell – Dell
• Larry Ellison – Oracle
• Larry Page – Google

I think the Visionary Founder is most often seen in industries that are new or are evolving quickly.  When new companies grow explosively from humble beginnings to huge influence, their founders often become the face of that new sector.  That’s true of high-tech today and has been true for several decades.  The earliest examples included William Hewlett and David Packard, founders of Hewlett-Packard. 

That kind of growth is less common in other sectors today.  However, looking back 100 years or more, we see that a similar pattern of Visionary Founders in the emerging industries of those days:

• Andrew Carnegie – Carnegie Steel Company
• Henry Ford – Ford Motor Company
• Conrad Hilton – Hilton Hotels
• J.P. Morgan – J. P. Morgan and Company
• John D Rockefeller – Standard Oil

We can find similar examples from the second half of the 20^th century:

• Mary Kay Ash – Mary Kay Cosmetics
• Ray Kroc – McDonalds
• Ralph Lauren – Polo and Ralph Lauren
• Ted Turner – CNN
• Sam Walton – Wal-Mart

Today’s celebrity CEOs aren’t isolated to new business sectors.  We’ve seen quite a few others in recent years:

• Giorgio Armani – Armani
• Howard Schultz – Starbucks
• Phil Knight – Nike
• Richard Branson – Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways and dozens of others
• Oprah Winfrey – Harpo Productions and Oprah Winfrey Network

All of these CEOs founded and built companies that transformed their industries.  Next time, we’ll explore some of the other “categories” of celebrity CEOs.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
Visionary Founders can become famous as their companies grow. 

That’s common (but not limited to) in emerging industries, which is why we see so many today in high-technology companies.

Do you know who these people are?  I consider myself fairly well-read about business, but (without getting help) I could only identify the blue ones.

1. Michael T. Duke
2. Rex W. Tillerson
3. John S. Watson
4. James J. Mulva
5. Michael J. Williams
6. Jeffrey R. Immelt
7. Warren E. Buffett
8. Daniel F. Akerson
9. Brian T. Moynihan
10. Alan R. Mulally
11. Meg Whitman
12. Randall L. Stephenson
13. James Dimon
14. Vikram S. Pandit
15. John H. Hammergren
16. Ivan G. Seidenberg
17. Robert H. Benmosche
18. Samuel J. Palmisano
19. George S. Barrett
20. Charles E. Haldeman Jr.

How about this list?  Again, the ones I knew are highlighted in blue:

1. Meg Whitman
2. Sam Palmisano
3. Michael Dell
4. Steve Ballmer
5. Tim Cook
6. John Chambers
7. Paul Otellini
8. Greg Brown / Sanjay Jha
9. Larry Ellison
10. Larry Page

The first list shows the CEOs of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies.

The second list shows the CEOs of the ten largest U.S.-based technology companies (ranked by 2009 revenue).

I recognized 80% of the second list, but only 25% of the first list.  Why is that?  Are Celebrity CEOs more prevalent in the technology industry?  Are there other factors involved?

I’ll explore possible explanations in my next post.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:

Celebrity CEOs seem to be more common for technology companies.

Here are the complete lists, with company names.

1. Michael T. Duke – WalMart
2. Rex W. Tillerson – Exxon Mobil
3. John S. Watson – Chevron
4. James J. Mulva – Conoco Philips
5. Michael J. Williams – Fannie Mae
6. Jeffrey R. Immelt – GE
7. Warren E. Buffett – Berkshire Hathaway
8. Daniel F. Akerson – General Motors
9. Brian T. Moynihan – Bank of America
10. Alan R. Mulally – Ford
11. Meg Whitman – Hewlett Packard
12. Randall L. Stephenson – AT&T
13. James Dimon – J.P. Morgan Chase
14. Vikram S. Pandit – Citibank
15. John H. Hammergren – McKesson
16. Ivan G. Seidenberg – Verizon
17. Robert H. Benmosche – AIG
18. Samuel J. Palmisano – IBM
19. George S. Barrett – Cardinal Health
20. Charles E. Haldeman Jr. – Freddie Mac

1. Meg Whitman – Hewlett Packard
2. Sam Palmisano – IBM
3. Michael Dell – Dell
4. Steve Ballmer – Microsoft
5. Tim Cook  – Apple
6. John Chambers – Cisco
7. Paul Otellini – Intel
8. Greg Brown / Sanjay Jha – Motorola
9. Larry Ellison – Oracle
10. Larry Page – Google

Continuing from my last post, let’s turn to theatre and sports, looking back at my thoughts from last quarter and looking forward to the rest of this year.

Musical Theatre

Summer is typically a quiet season for new shows opening on Broadway.  Like the movie industry (which clusters the release of the most promising Academy Award candidates at the end of the year), the theatre industry often clusters the best Tony Award candidates of the year at the end of the “season” (which typically concludes near the end of April).

There have been only a few significant musical openings so far this season:

• Spider-Man, Turn Off The Dark – I’ve commented on this one before: here and here.
• Follies – This revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies has received rave reviews.  It features an incredible cast: Bernadette Peters, Elaine Paige, and Danny Burstein.

Last week brought a much-anticipated new play, The Mountaintop, which provides a look at the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  It is a two person play with immense star power: Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett.  It opened to mixed reviews.

Over the next three months, there are quite a few openings that make me wish I lived closer to New York:

• Plays and Play Revivals
  • Relatively Speaking – An intriguing collection of three one-act comedies with big name writers: Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen.
  • Chinglish – A new comedy by David Henry Hwang “about the challenges of doing business in a culture whose language and ways of communicating are worlds apart from our own.”
  • Private Lives – The 8^th Broadway production of Noel Coward’s brilliant comedy (which opened originally in 1931), starring Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross.

• New Musicals
  • Bonnie and Clyde – Most people are familiar with this story of two country kids who become wanted criminals.  It’s written by frequent Broadway composer Frank Wildhorn.  He is frequent, but I can’t understand why he keeps getting produced.  Nearly everything he’s written has been unsuccessful and those that are successful aren’t very good: Jekyll and Hyde (1543 performance), The Scarlet Pimpernel (772), The Civil War (61), Dracula (157), and Wonderland (33).  I’m rooting for this one to surprise me – its Music Director is John McDaniel (who was my son’s boss when he worked on Catch Me If You Can earlier this year) and one of the principals is Seattle native Louis Hobson.
  • Lysistrata Jones – This risky new show is based on Lysistrata, a 2400 year-old play by Aristophanes.  Lysistrata is a comedy about women who withhold sex in order to inspire their husbands to negotiate an end to the current war.  This new production transports the story to present day Athens, Georgia, focusing on a group of cheerleaders who refuse to sleep with the members of the basketball team until they start winning games.

• Musical Revivals
  • Godspell – Stephen Schwartz’s rock musical returns to Broadway in its first revival (after winning a Tony-award for Best Original Score in its 527 performance run in 1976-77).
  • On a Clear Day You Can See Forever – The original production (by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner) was poorly received on Broadway in 1965. The first revival features Harry Connick Jr. and a new book written by Peter Parnell (author of the play The Cider House Rules based on the novel by John Irving, and of much of The West Wing, with Aaron Sorkin).
  • Porgy and Bess (not until January) – George Gershwin’s masterpiece returns to Broadway for the 8^th time.  This production features Broadway’s greatest current actress, the incomparable four-time Tony award winner: Audra McDonald.

• Special Events
  • Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway – Most people know Jackman as a movie star, especially for playing Wolverine in the X-Men series.  Fewer people know that he’s a genuine star as a stage actor too.  He won a Tony Award (and every other award) for his portrayal of Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. He has also starred in Oklahoma in London and on Broadway in 2009 in A Steady Rain. This limited run concert starts this month and will probably sell out every show.
  • An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin – A few misguided people might dispute my statement above that Audra is “Broadway’s greatest current actress,” choosing Patti LuPone instead.  Those people are wrong.  Still, Patti is a major star, with two Tony awards.  This concert, which opens in November, reunites these two stars for the first time since their joint Tony-winning performances in Evita.

Sports

In July, I made two predictions about sports labor disputes:

• In my opinion, the NFL battle will be resolved, probably within the next ten days.
  • On July 25^th, the NFL and the NFL Players Association announced their new collective bargaining agreement.
• The NBA looks to be positioned for a long and ugly stand-off.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the entire season was cancelled.
  • Several weeks of games have already been cancelled and the parties don’t seem much closer to an agreement.  I’ll stand by what I said then: it still seems likely that the season will be cancelled.

In baseball, my predictions (which I had thought were low-risk) were pretty poor:

• NL Playoffs: Philadelphia, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Atlanta
• AL Playoffs: Boston, Cleveland, LA Angels, and the evil NY Yankees

I got two of four in the National League; one of four in the AL.  That’s pathetic.

• World Series: Philadelphia over Boston in 6 games.

The final four teams are Milwaukee, St. Louis, Texas, and Detroit, so I’m already 100% wrong there.

Since I did so well in baseball, I’ll turn my sights to the NFL.  About one-third through the season, here are my picks for the playoffs:

• AFC East – New England
• AFC North – Pittsburgh
• AFC South – Tennessee
• AFC West – San Diego
• AFC Wild Cards – Buffalo, Baltimore
• NFC East – New York Giants
• NFC North – Green Bay
• NFC South – New Orleans
• NFC West – San Francisco
• NFC Wild Cards – Detroit, Atlanta

• AFC Championship – San Diego over Baltimore
• NFC Championship – New Orleans over Green Bay
• Super Bowl – San Diego over New Orleans

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Don’t ever use my sports predictions as the basis for any decision.

Instead, feel free to use my Broadway theatre info as the basis for ticket-buying.

Fall is in the air here in Seattle (and most other places in the U.S. and Europe).  We’ve had some lovely, crisp autumn days over the past week.

At the beginning of each quarter this year, I’ve written about topics that I’ll be tracking throughout the year.  With another quarter gone, it’s time for an update.  I’ll split this article into two parts – today I’ll cover work-related topics and next time I’ll look at my other, more personal interests.

Business Intelligence Industry

There are three big (and converging) industry trends:

• Big Data – everyone wants to analyze immense data sets.  When terabytes of data are involved, traditional DBMS and BI solutions can’t perform adequately, so new approaches are needed.  Vendors like QlikTech pioneered this space, but all the major players are now paying attention.
• In Memory Computing and Appliances – Oracle’s Exa-whatever family of products competes directly with SAP’s Hana offering.  As with Big Data, the big vendors are chasing some of the innovative smaller vendors (like QlikTech) while also trying to move into the space that Teradata has owned for years.
• Mobile BI – Apple’s iPad (with some help from the iPhone and Android phones) has brought this sector to prominence.  All of the vendors are racing to provide new offerings (or to emphasize how their old offerings are “mobile ready”).

For my company (and many others) the biggest event of the past several months was Oracle OpenWorld 2011 (although technically it fell in Q4).  I wrote about OOW here, here, here and here.

Meanwhile, SAP finally released BusinessObjects 4, a new major release of their flagship BI suite.  It became generally available on September 16.  It updates their entire suite: Web Intelligence, Dashboards, Crystal Reports, Explorer, the Business Intelligence Platform, and more.  It’ll be interesting to see whether SAP gains any momentum with this new release.  They had lagged behind in Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant, in part because the other major vendors had already delivered their major new releases.

For Microsoft, the Denali project now has an official (but not surprising) product name: SQL Server 2012.  It’s scheduled for release in the first half of next year.  Last week, Microsoft jumped on the Big Data band wagon, announcing that SQL Server 2012 will include big data features based on Apache Hadoop. Not surprisingly, they also announced that their mobile BI features will be extended to Apple iPads and iPhones. 

Oracle

In July, I said, “Fusion continues to be delayed – it’s still not generally available – but Oracle continues to tout its promise and its success with early adopters.  I’m still skeptical.”  Now that it’s generally available, it sounds really good.  However, I remain skeptical.  Even if it’s everything it’s claimed to be, will any customers be able to afford it?

On the acquisition front, things have picked up again.  After just one acquisition in Q1 and one more that I wrote about after Q2, Oracle gobbled up five other companies (two that I missed in Q2 and three more last quarter):

• Datanomic – April – data quality software for risk and compliance screening
• Pillar Data Systems – June – network storage systems
• Ksplice – July – an open source provider of Linux kernel extensions
• InQuira – July – service knowledge management software
• GoAhead – September — service management software for the communications industry

Can we find any trends or see any future direction from Oracle’s recent acquisitions?  I certainly can’t.  They all seem fairly unrelated – small, targeted niche additions to isolated parts of the product portfolio.  I expect we’ll continue to see more of the same, although I wouldn’t rule out a blockbuster acquisition. 

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

New trends in BI provide opportunities for many new niche vendors, but the major players seem quicker than ever in recognizing (and filling) the most important niches.

Oracle OpenWorld ended last Thursday.  The week included several major announcements from Oracle.  Here is my take on the biggest of those:

• Fusion Applications are now Generally Available
  • This marks the culmination of six years of effort and is a major accomplishment for Oracle.  They presented a list of more than 100 functional areas that are currently available, along with more than 200 early adopter customers.
  • The integration of business intelligence (BI) directly into the applications is touted as a major innovation.  It seems to be thorough and well thought out.  I’ll definitely be digging into this more in the coming months.

• New Exalytics BI Appliance
  • Exalytics is especially interesting to those of us in the BI space.
  • Early reactions from SAP:
    • Why SAP Hana is better (written by SAP)
    • Old Wine in New Wineskins

• Oracle Public Cloud and Oracle Social Network
  • Oracle Public Cloud is a hosted offering of Fusion Applications (with Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database as the foundation).
  • Early analyst reactions match mine – this is yet another hastily assembled incomplete offering.
    • Oracle Social Network baffles
  • This is Oracle’s PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering and, as such, it takes direct aim at Microsoft Azure (and the recently announced not-yet-available Google Cloud SQL).  It will be interesting to watch the battles that unfold in that space.

The week featured a lot of distraction from the ongoing war of words (most of it childish) between Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff.  I won’t elaborate on that here – I spoke enough about it last week.

One final comment: the concerts at the Appreciation Event on Wednesday night were a great success.  Sting was incredible.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers also delivered an outstanding performance.  Those who stayed until the very end (which I did) saw a short but inspired performance by The English Beat.  The evening was rain-free (confounding all the weather forecasts).  Nothing hampered our enjoyment – not even the drunken idiot who (literally) collapsed and crashed into my wife and me.  Congratulations to Oracle for a spectacular event.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
It will be interesting if Oracle can deliver on its product promises, especially the new cloud offerings.  We’ll be watching (along with lots of others).

Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) was another busy day of sessions for me and Wednesday promises to be just as full.

The Tuesday morning keynote featured Michael Dell (founder and CEO of Dell Computer), followed by EVP of Systems at Oracle, John Fowler.  Not surprisingly, both focused on hardware, so there was little in either presentation that captured my interest.

Wednesday morning brought John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, delivering a great keynote about strategic directions and change in the technology industry.  He was followed by Oracle’s SVP of Application Development Steve Miranda, covering Oracle applications, including Fusion Applications, which are now generally available.

• Exadata / Exalogic / Hardware
  • No change from yesterday.  I still get a B for predicting a new machine announcement, but not having any idea what it would be.
• Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff
  • My Prediction: I don’t expect Ellison to let Benioff get the last word here.  There’ll be more theatrics (and probably some more dismissive comments about SalesForce) in Ellison’s keynote.
  • What Happened So Far: This is the big news of the day.  On Tuesday evening, Oracle cancelled Benioff’s planned keynote for Wednesday morning.  Here are a few reactions:
    • “Petty or just incompetent?”
    • “Is it all a set up?”
    • “Benioff hits back…”
    • “Benioff yanked from OOW”

Benioff quickly rescheduled to deliver his presentation at a local hotel.  That is scheduled for 10:30 am Wednesday.

I’ll give myself an A here, and I’ll guarantee there will be more excitement still to come.

• Fusion Applications
  • My Prediction: Ellison (and probably EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian, in his keynote) will repeatedly emphasize the point that “Fusion is ready” (even if it isn’t).  However, I don’t expect any significant new announcements here.
  • What Happened So Far: Steve Miranda and Group VP of Oracle Fusion and GRC Apps Dev Chris Leone covered this in detail at the Applications General Session on Tuesday and again in Miranda’s keynote Wednesday morning.My grade has gone up to a B here.  I mistakenly expected Kurian to talk about Fusion, but the rest has been pretty accurate.

• Oracle BI 11g
  • My Prediction: I don’t expect many new announcements in this area either, although there will be many conference sessions providing real-life details about Oracle’s BI products.  Any BI focus for OpenWorld keynotes will probably be part of a larger discussion of Fusion Applications.
  • What Happened So Far: This one goes up to a C, since I got most of the keynote part right (and the “many conference sessions”).

• Hewlett Packard and Oracle
  • My Prediction: Ellison (and others) will focus on “HP as a competitor we want to destroy” and possibly attempt to portray HP as an even larger villain than SAP.
  • What Happened So Far: This grade is still an F.

So, that’s one A, two Bs, a C and an F.  That’s a 2.4 GPA, which won’t move me to the top of the class.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:

I’m looking forward to Benioff’s non-keynote Wednesday morning and Ellison’s keynote Wednesday afternoon.

Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is under way. I attended a full day of sessions on Sunday and Monday. In addition, I saw Larry Ellison’s keynote address Sunday night and the Monday morning keynote by Oracle Presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, and Oracle EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian.

The big trend of the show (at least for the keynotes) has been the nearly total dedication to hardware. Ellison and Kurian both talked almost exclusively about the trio of Exadata / Exalogic / Exalytics. [See below for Exalytics details] We heard lots of details about how they work, why they’re so fast, and how they will dominate the competition.

Ellison’s keynote was 100% focused on hardware: Exadata, Exalogic, and the newly announced Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine. His delivery was aggressive (especially toward IBM) and his demeanor was more superior, more confrontational, and more smug than usual (which isn’t easy!). General reaction among Twitter observers seemed to be pretty negative.

Here are some follow ups to my predictions from last week:

• Exadata / Exalogic / Hardware
o My Prediction: There’s been a fair amount of analyst speculation that Oracle is planning more Exa-whatever announcements at OOW. It seems a pretty safe bet that we’ll see something new. Meanwhile, Ellison will probably continue to explain “why Sun Microsystems was a successful acquisition.”
o What Happened So Far: The big announcement so far is the new Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine. I’ll give myself a B for this one – I guessed that there would be a new Exa- device.

• Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
o My Prediction: I don’t expect Ellison to let Benioff get the last word here. There’ll be more theatrics (and probably some more dismissive comments about SalesForce) in Ellison’s keynote.
o What Happened So Far: Nothing yet from Ellison related to SF or Benioff. It hasn’t been completely silent though – Benioff tweeted a few barbs in response to Ellison’s keynote Sunday night:
• “A low bar has been set. See you Wednesday at 10 AM”
• “In what some are already pegging the worst keynote ever, Larry’s opening speech was perhaps more boastful than usual” [Quoted from this article.]
Meanwhile, others are anticipating some more fireworks from Benioff on Wednesday.

I’ll give myself an incomplete grade here – the story isn’t finished.

• Fusion Applications
o Prediction: Ellison (and probably Thomas Kurian, in his keynote) will repeatedly emphasize the point that “Fusion is ready” (even if it isn’t). However, I don’t expect any significant new announcements here.
o What Happened So Far: Nothing – Ellison didn’t address Fusion at all. Neither did Hurd or Catz. Kurian mentioned it only in passing. This seemed strange. There have been lots of Fusion Applications sessions, but the “public” emphasis has been near zero. It’s likely that this will change in Ellison’s second keynote on Wednesday.

So far, I get a D here, but I have a chance to raise my grade with SVP of Application Development Steve Miranda and Larry Ellison’s upcoming keynotes.

• Oracle BI 11g
o Prediction: I don’t expect many new announcements in this area either, although there will be many conference sessions providing real-life details about Oracle’s BI products. Any BI focus for OpenWorld keynotes will probably be part of a larger discussion of Fusion Applications.
o What Happened So Far: I missed this one completely – the Exalytics announcement is all about BI. There’s a new OBI EE release planned to support the new BI machine and it’ll have new features to take advantage of the massive performance improvements that Exalytics will provide.

Nearly all of my time has been spent in BI sessions, getting updates on the product road map for various parts of the Oracle BI product family.

Another D.

• Hewlett Packard and Oracle
o Prediction: Ellison (and others) will focus on “HP as a competitor we want to destroy” and possibly attempt to portray HP as an even larger villain than SAP.
o What Happened So Far: So far, I’m wrong here too. Ellison’s focus on Sunday was IBM, not HP or SAP.

I get an F for this prediction.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

The focus so far has been hardware and “Engineered Systems.” My prediction grades are really bad, but I’m hopeful that they’ll rise before the end of the show.

Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is next week in San Francisco.  Oracle describes it as “the world’s largest and most important conference for Oracle technologists, business users, and partners.”  Each year, this event serves as a focal point for major announcements from Oracle, leading to widespread speculation about what those announcements will be.  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison consistently uses the event as a forum to trumpet new ideas, re-emphasize old ideas, and denigrate his adversaries. It should be an interesting show.

Here are some things I’ll be anticipating, along with a few predictions:

• Exadata / Exalogic / Hardware
  • Background: Since acquiring Sun Microsystems, Oracle has been pushing aggressively into the hardware business, but there’s been criticism of the acquisition from many analysts and industry observers.  The Exadata database appliance (initially developed jointly with HP) was improved (in Version 2) by integrating Sun technology.  Last year, Oracle announced the Exalogic Elastic Cloud.  Last week, Oracle announced the Oracle Database Appliance – a medium-sized Exadata aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. 
  • Prediction: There’s been a fair amount of analyst speculation that Oracle is planning more Exa-whatever announcements at OOW.  It seems a pretty safe bet that we’ll see something new.  Meanwhile, Ellison will probably continue to explain “why Sun Microsystems was a successful acquisition.”
• Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff
  • Background: At last year’s event, there was some mutual mocking about “cloud” offerings between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff.  Early this month in a keynote at his company’s Dreamforce event, Benioff re-ignited that battle by mocking Exadata (again) as “the false cloud.” The disagreement is deep (and isn’t going to go away anytime soon).
  • Prediction: I don’t expect Ellison to let Benioff get the last word here.  There’ll be more theatrics (and probably some more dismissive comments about SalesForce) in Ellison’s keynote.
• Fusion Applications
  • Background: Ellison said this about Fusion in Oracle’s Q3 earnings call last week: “We’ve been working on Fusion Apps for almost six years now, and we have about 200 customers using Fusion Apps. We’re going — before the end of this calendar year – we’re going to have general availability on Fusion.”  
  • Prediction: Ellison (and probably EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian, in his keynote) will repeatedly emphasize the point that “Fusion is ready” (even if it isn’t).  However, I don’t expect any significant new announcements here.
• Oracle BI 11g
  • Background: This will be my focus for the show (as it was last year).  The 11g version of Oracle’s flagship business intelligence (BI) product (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition or OBI EE) was released about a year ago.  Accompanying releases of Oracle BI Applications have been delivered this year.  Most of the sessions I’ll attend will be focused on these offerings.
  • Prediction: I don’t expect many new announcements in this area either, although there will be many conference sessions providing real-life details about Oracle’s BI products.  Any BI focus for OpenWorld keynotes will probably be part of a larger discussion of Fusion Applications.
• Hewlett Packard and Oracle
  • Background: Oracle hired Mark Hurd as co-president about a year ago.  That hiring (and the drama around it) began a very public battle between the two companies.  [I’ve written about this previously: here and here.]
  • Prediction: Ellison (and others) will focus on “HP as a competitor we want to destroy” and possibly attempt to portray HP as an even larger villain than SAP.
• Customer Appreciation Event
  • Background: I’m particularly looking forward to the Appreciation Event on Wednesday night.  Featured performers: Sting, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Dave Wakeling & The English Beat. 

    [OK – I’ll admit it.  I’ve never heard of Dave Wakeling & The English Beat.  But the other two?  I’m thrilled!]

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
Pay attention at Oracle OpenWorld; Larry Ellison is never boring!

Last week, Hewlett-Packard removed its CEO, ousting Léo Apotheker (who was hired less than a year ago) and replaced him with Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay).  It’s the latest in a string of embarrassments for the HP Board of Directors.  [I’m not alone in this assessment; after the announcement CNN asked if HP’s Board was the “worst ever”]

Here’s some background on HP’s CEO travails over the past decade:

• Carly Fiorina was hired as CEO in 1999, with quite a bit of fanfare as the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company.  Fiorina had a tumultuous tenure in this position, with much of the battling focused on her acquisition attempts.  She tried to acquire EDS (a computer services company) in 2000, but gave up in the face of resistance from HP shareholders.  In 2002, she led the acquisition of Compaq (a leading personal computer maker), prevailing over shareholder objections in yet another difficult battle.  Fiorina was finally forced out as CEO in 2005, in a departure that was handled awkwardly by HP’s Board.
• Mark Hurd (from NCR) was brought in as CEO in 2005.  He lived up to his reputation as an aggressive (even ruthless) cost-cutter.  He laid off 10% of HP’s employees soon after taking over.  In the summer of 2010, in another awkwardly handled public dispute, the HP board forced Hurd to resign.  This followed an investigation from which HP’s Board concluded that he had acted inappropriately in a situation that resulted in a sexual harassment complaint against him.  [I wrote about this in this blog last year.]
• Léo Apotheker was named CEO in September 2010.  Apotheker had been forced out as CEO of SAP in February 2010. During his tenure as HP’s CEO, HP stock lost about 40% of its value.  Much of that decline came in August, when HP announced that it was dropping its tablet computer business and was looking to sell (or spin-off) its PC division.

So, now it’s Meg Whitman, former CEO of online auction giant eBay.  She joined eBay very early in its history and built a strong executive team that helped drive its success.  However, the company went public only 6 months after Whitman was hired, so its success was clearly already well underway before she arrived.

Whitman oversaw tremendous growth in her ten years at eBay.  The acquisitions of PayPal and the European auction site iBazaar helped fuel that growth.  However, Whitman had at least one highly visible strategic misstep at eBay.  The 2005 acquisition of Skype (for $4.1 billion) was never successfully integrated and in 2008 Skype was sold for $2.75 billion. 

What does Whitman bring to HP?  That’s not clear yet (at least to me).  Her experience at eBay doesn’t seem directly applicable to addressing HP’s needs.  There’s no question that eBay was (and still is) one of the shining successes of the internet age.  She presided over a growing, thriving internet company during the internet boom.  How much of that was her doing?  And, more importantly, which of her skills will matter at HP?

eBay is a consumer-to-consumer business.  Whitman has very little enterprise business experience and she has no hardware experience.  She also has no experience running a services business.

That doesn’t seem to bode well.  However, with HP stock at its lowest point in more than five years, it’s also likely that, no matter what she does, it will look like success.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
Here’s one thing the HP Board is good at – CEO severance packages:

• Fiorina: between $21 million and $42 million [Source: CNNMoney]
• Hurd: $12.2 million in cash (and he forfeited about $14 million in stock, in a settlement that followed his hiring by Oracle after he left HP) [Source: USAToday]
• Apotheker: at least $7.2 million cash + $18 million stock  [Source: CNNMoney]

It’s officially summer here in Seattle (and everywhere else in the northern hemisphere).  The 4^th of July holiday (Independence Day in the U.S.) is behind us and warm weather has finally arrived.

In January, I wrote about some things that I’d be tracking throughout the year and in April I looked back at the first quarter of the year.  Now it’s time to review the first half of the year, while also looking forward to the rest of 2011.

Business Intelligence Industry

One big recent trend has been the continued growth of Microsoft BI.  You might ask “What is Microsoft BI?” since many people don’t even realize Microsoft has a BI offering.  That’s part of their problem – Microsoft’s message is incoherent and their products are disjointed.  In spite of those problems, they’re gaining some traction because the functionality they offer is pretty strong.  Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference is taking place this week in Los Angeles and I expect there will be some big BI announcements there.   I’ll explore this topic (including their announcements from the conference) in an upcoming post dedicated to MS BI. 

Meanwhile, SAP Business Objects is primed to catch up to Oracle and IBM Cognos with Business Objects 4, a new major release of their flagship BI suite.  Maybe they’ve already released it – maybe it’s coming soon.  Sadly, I can’t tell.  Go ahead – use your search engine and try to figure it out.  Reports from earlier this year indicate that it would be released at SAP’s Sapphire conference in May.  Since I didn’t attend that conference and I can’t find a release announcement online, I just can’t tell.  It’s a terrible job of marketing and publicity (even worse than Microsoft BI).

Oracle

Oracle announced its fiscal Q4 financials and (just like last quarter) the results were strong.  This marked Oracle’s first ever quarter of $10B in total revenue and $1B in applications revenue.  Oracle continues to be fairly quiet and subdued about Fusion Applications (the next generation of ERP/CRM offerings).  Fusion continues to be delayed – it’s still not generally available – but Oracle continues to tout its promise and its success with early adopters.  I’m still skeptical.

On the acquisition front, Oracle is again being uncharacteristically quiet.  After just one acquisition in Q1, Oracle made only a single pickup in the second quarter.  In June, Oracle announced the acquisition of FatWire Software, a web content software provider.  What’s going on with Oracle?  After nine acquisitions in 2010, the pace has slowed to a crawl.  At the Q4 earnings call, Oracle’s executives stated their belief that many companies were not overvalued and that they would not overpay to acquire them,  We’ll wait and see how long that remains true.

Musical Theatre

The Tony Awards were presented on June 12.  The big winner was The Book of Mormon, which took home 9 Tony Awards, the most of any show since The Producers won a record 12 in 2001.  Of personal interest to me was Norbert Leo Butz winning his second Tony (Leading Actor in a Musical) for his performance in Catch Me If You Can.

Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opened in mid-June.  It had gone on hiatus for some retooling and script doctoring.  The reviews upon its return were better than the reviews from earlier this year, but still not very good.

Sports

Not much has changed on the sports labor front since I posted in April.  Will the threatened labor disputes in professional football and basketball result in cancelled games (or even entire cancelled seasons)?  The NFL players have been locked out, in a labor battle with the NFL owners since April.  Meanwhile, the NBA has entered its own labor battle and the 2011-2012 season looks to be in jeopardy.   In my opinion, the NFL battle will be resolved, probably within the next 10 days.  The NBA, on the other hand, looks to be positioned for a long and ugly stand-off.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the entire season were cancelled.

The Major League Baseball season is in full swing.  Notable stories of the year:

• Many of last year’s losers are respectable in 2011
  • Seven teams lost more than 90 games in 2010, all with winning percentages of .426 or worse.
  • Four of those seven – Washington Nationals, Pittsburgh Pirate, Arizona Diamondbacks, and Cleveland Indians are currently above .500.  That’s a tremendous turn-around for teams that were expected to be pretty bad.  In addition, the Seattle Mariners (who were also terrible in 2010) had been playing around .500 until a recent losing streak.
• The Philadelphia Phillies look like the team to beat.  Their pitching (especially starting pitching) is dominant.  Still, the Atlanta Braves look like they’ll challenge the Phillies for the NL title.
• Derek Jeter, a guaranteed Hall of Fame player who is paradoxically also one of the most overrated players in baseball, reached 3000 career hits – the 28^th major league player to achieve that milestone.  Soon, I’ll write a post about how greatness can be overrated.

Here are my baseball predictions (with very little risk taking):

• NL Playoffs: Philadelphia, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Atlanta
• AL Playoffs: Boston, Cleveland, LA Angels, and the evil NY Yankees
• World Series: Philadelphia over Boston in 6 games.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Enjoy the summer!