Ellison's Provocation: You Have to Be Willing to Spend Less to Know More

LONDON, UK ORACLE APPSWORLD, June 24, 2003 -- Oracle Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison opened his keynote address today to thousands of European and Middle Eastern Oracle applications users with a thought provoking question: "What is it about spending billions on automating businesses that continues to deny us [CEOs] the information coming out of these systems?"

Speaking to the market's traditional approach to applications, Ellison explained that building applications to suit specific departments has resulted in an "overwhelming problem" due to data fragmentation and incomplete business automation. Every time another application is added, data is further fragmented. "All we can see is the trees and really not the forest," he continued.

The industry needs to think about information first, he said, instead of the traditional approach of putting departmental functionality first.

"The whole [applications] industry grew up with an inverted point-of-view," Ellison emphasized. "Instead of selling the ideal system to automate marketing, we [Oracle] asked what information is the most important? What information does the company care about most? The most important information is information about the customer."

Illustrating his point, Ellison cited the industry-wide promise of CRM to provide a 360-degree view of the customer. "It's a fascinating claim, but CRM can never, by definition, give you a 360-degree view. CRM systems do not bill customers. CRM systems do not know whether a customer has bought or paid. That's a billing and accounting system. I would like to keep the promise of CRM, but you need a complete business system, a suite, in order to do so."

Ellison went on to highlight two other benefits of Oracle's applications suite built on a global single instance: lower costs and better business information.

"Every time you eliminate a customer database [by centralizing], you save money and receive better information. And everyone can use a little information sometimes."

After giving the audience a sense of the types of information and business intelligence available with Oracle E-Business Suite, Ellison underscored the increasingly important role that information will play in business. "The 'I' in CIO stands for Information. Modern systems will focus on information, not the technology underneath," he concluded.

Oracle AppsWorld Europe opened today to a record-setting number of attendees -- 13,000 -- with local conferences across Europe in London, Madrid, Paris and Rome.

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