September 30, 2010
Ray Lane at HP
Leo Apotheker is taking over as CEO of HP, and Ray Lane as chairman. I don’t know Leo, but I did talk a lot with Ray when he was at Oracle in the 1990s. Quick observations include:
- Ray Lane was a highly effective leader at Oracle, both calm and tough. That doesn’t mean he had perfect control of the company, but things were much better managed once he was there.
- Jeff Henley helped too, but I think Ray was the important one.
- In particular, Ray introduced accountability for making customers happy.
- Ray also somewhat tamed Oracle’s politics.
- Dueling execs Mike Fields and Craig Conway both quickly left Oracle when he arrived. This was on the whole a good thing, even though both had the talent to go on and run major software companies.
- In an exchange that was widely known even at the time, Ray told Ron Wohl he’d get him fired, to which Ron responded “Thank you — this is the first time anybody at Oracle has ever been stabbed in the FRONT.” That said, Ron did last at Oracle for a long time thereafter.
- I don’t know what happened at the end, but for years Larry Ellison was VERY pleased to have Ray at Oracle.
- There always were some Young Turk kinds of project leaders outside Ray’s control, most famously Mark Benioff.
- Ray Lane innovated the tight integration of software and professional services.
- The software/services combination was central to Oracle’s success in the 1990s.
- Ray obviously got the idea from his prior jobs, e.g. at EDS (where, this being a small world, he shared an office with Dave Peterschmidt, later the disastrously incompetent COO of Sybase).
- American Management Systems, under Charles Rossotti, did an ever better job with the same strategy earlier (albeit at a much smaller company). Otherwise, it was Ray who taught the industry how to succeed at it.
- It’s a pretty good guess that Ray leaving Oracle had a lot to do with Oracle retreating from that strategy, whatever the exact combination of cause and effect was.
- Come to think of it, it’s an even better guess now that Mark Hurd is at Oracle. The Oracle tenures of Ray Lane, Chuck/Charles Phillips, and Mark Hurd each reflect very different kinds of business models.
- HP has been pursuing a similar strategy with much less success. Perhaps Ray can teach them how to do it right.
- Ray Lane is still listed as a Vertica advisor. Start your own rumor accordingly. That said, Jerry Held has been much more involved with Vertica than Ray.
I have to head out soon to a meeting. More later.
Edit: I’ve added more about Ray Lane and Oracle in the 1990s over on Software Memories.
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9 Responses to “Ray Lane at HP”
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Oracle adds Sun and Hurd and pursues a “systems” approach that combines HW + SW.
HP, traditionally a HW company, responds by hiring two software guys who have battled Larry both internally and externally.
It may be a cold war between HP & Oracle now, but it appears ready to get hot. Will HP merge with SAP to counter the systems sell by Oracle and IBM? Is Dell the odd man out? We live in interesting times.
[…] I mentioned above. Rather, it was Ray Lane. Some of the reason, as I’ve already noted on DBMS 2, was general good management. Ray was also a tireless salesman, for example once telling me of a […]
[…] a software guy, Leo Apotheker, as CEO, and a software guy with a liking for high-end services, Ray Lane, as chairman. Now a Leo Apotheker conference call suggests HP will increase its emphasis on […]
Lane has a serious of fraud issue on his plate already — at Carnegie Mellon:
http://www.CarnegieMellonFraud.com/Memo-to-Ray-Lane.htm
“Eliot Ness”,
That site is well-nigh unreadable.
Yeah, I know, it’s overloaded … I’m going back and simplifying and installing a menu system … but be advised that there is enough material in there to warrant a criminal prosecution for theft-by-deception, which a third-degree felony in the state of Pennsylvania punishable by up to seven years in prison … and Lane should be pursuing it … I’ve made the site an easy-reading comic book with lots of pictures because the target audience is Congress … see http://www.CarnegieMellonFraud.com/SSD.htm
Are you saying Carnegie Mellon did something illegal, and that Lane — in view of his status there — is responsible for running it down?
Also — what’s your angle here, in regarding this alleged crime as more worthy of your attention than many others?
Lane is toast, a dead-man-walking in near-psychotic denial … but deep down he knows it … which may be why he is so uncharacteristically testy about Hurd/Apotheker.
I will explain in detail to your company e-mail.
Nothing uncharacteristic about Ray’s letter. It was direct, unsparing, and otherwise polite — which is pretty much the way Ray always is in his business interactions.