KEY POINTS:
Larry Ellison's appearance last night at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco where he opened the Oracle Open World conference, gave me the first opportunity to see the Donald Trump of the IT world in the flesh since he was down in Auckland in 2003-04 to try and win the America's Cup.
Back then, he'd considered building a software development lab in the Bay of Islands, a plan that withered and died along with his America's Cup hopes. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and on the 30th anniversary of Oracle, Ellison was in the mood to reminisce.
He gave a rambling speech punctuated with sentimental anecdotes that went on too long but nevertheless gave an interesting insight into the early days of the database software maker. For instance, it was news to me that Oracle took its name from a code word for an IT project Ellison had worked on for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Because the project failed the name was available," Ellison explained.
As is often the way with successful business people looking back on the early days, the billionaire painted a picture of a bunch of young kids full of confidence but winging it when it came to the details of running a business.
His tale of the early days of looking after Oracle's accounts was hilarious. There were no accounts. Applying for a business loan, Ellison and company simply copied the format of other companies' balance sheets and hoped for the best.
They got the loan, but accounting was still very much a hit and miss affair. Later, Ellison recruited Berkeley university student John Kemp to do his books.
"Why don't you stop being a pizza boy and instead be our chief financial officer," he asked Kemp who used to deliver pizza to Oracle's Sand Hill road offices in Silicon Valley. He went on to become Oracle's first chief financial officer.
There appear to have been some truly testing times before the money started rolling in from the Government contracts Oracle secured with its first relational database software.
"We didn't have a version 1, who would buy version one of a database from four guys in California?" said Ellison. It took the CIA nine months to pay the fledgling company for work completed.
"The bank's about to foreclose on my house, a marine's about to shoot me. This start-up stuff was not what I thought it would be," quipped Ellison, who punctuated his speech with cackles of laughter.
His trip down memory lane also served as an anniversary dedication to Bob Miner, Oracle's co-founder who died in 1994, but skipped over much of Oracle's more recent history.
Ellison did pause to reflect on the rough times that Oracle went through in the early nineties when its unbroken record of revenue and profit growth was finally broken.
"I had driven the company into a brick wall at 150mph. It was a disaster," said Ellison. "I said give me a second chance, I now know what a recession is."
Forbes has a report on the speech, and IT Business has more in-depth coverage.
Ellison's stories were entertaining, but his attempts at modesty weren't convincing. This guy was ruthlessly ambitious from the beginning and the order and dominance of Oracle today springs directly from the groundwork he and his talent deputies, many of whom have stuck with him for years, laid back in 1977.
