View From the C Suite
Earlier this week I attended Oracle’s Open World conference, along with about 41,000 customers and partners. The keynote speakers were a heady group of high-tech players, including Oracle President Charles Phillips, Dell Chairman Michael Dell, Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, and Cisco President and CEO John Chambers. And, of course, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison – but I was off to Vegas for Better Management Live, so missed his presentation. Each took a different approach to their presentations.
After a bit of flash, with Phillips joined on stage by Jason Richardson of the Golden State Warriors basketball team to announce the renaming of the team’s home court to Oracle Arena, Phillips of course, discussed Oracle’s accomplishments this past year, as well as what he calls Oracles umbrella strategy, which is a focus on delivering a mix of applications and a supporting technology stack to best serve customers.
Dell, who I thought was a great presenter style-wise, unfortunately spent his hour giving an in-depth sales pitch on Dell servers. The continuous stream of people exiting showed some attendees’ disappointment with what was expected to be a more general, instructive talk on optimizing data centers.
HP’s Hurd took an interesting approach to his keynote. He presented a case study of sorts on how HP is overhauling its IT operations not only to cut costs, but also to create a better customer experience. “We’re trying to make HP an easier company to do business with,” he said. “We have a strategy that will make it easier to get stuff done. We have a lot of work to do to get better and we’re committed to it.” (Check out “The Three Pillars of Holistic Service,” which gives insight into why Hewlett-Packard believes its success depends on increasing customer loyalty.)
I enjoyed Hurd’s presentation, and his matter-of-fact style. But my favorite of the keynote sessions I attended was Cisco’s Chambers. He put on his soothsayer hat and talked about how important it is to see into the future. “We do not react to competitors,” he said. “We react to the market and where it’s going.” According to Chambers, the ability to catch market transitions three to five years before they’re obvious is imperative, because if you wait until they happen, it’s too late.
Chambers predicted that two to three years from now the business environment will be driven by the next wave of market transitions, among them he cited the growing power of the human network, customer experience (including users defining that experience), collaboration, and the blurring of content/device boundaries.
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