Welcome to my Blog!
In this first blog entry, I would like to share some background about myself, my life at Oracle, and current business focus. My goal is to provide regular entries on this blog with the hope that they will be meaningful, provide some insight into life at Oracle, and our pursuit of a common goal, to create while delivering value and results. It is amazing what can be accomplished with focus, careful execution, a great team, and the tremendous resources that comprise Oracle.
My History
Since joining Oracle in 1986, I’ve worked in various capacities and divisions throughout the company, including sales, marketing, product marketing, product management, alliances, pre-sales, performance, development, consulting, support and education.
After nearly 30 years in the hi-tech industry, and 23 years at Oracle, I’ve been involved with thousands of customers of all sizes, in all industries, all major geographic regions, at all levels of their businesses, and visited many at one or more of their sites.
I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything! Seeing how companies run their businesses on solutions we provide is a powerful experience. There are so many factors that contribute to success. The ones that stand out the most to me based on my experiences include being creative, flexible, thriving on and exploiting change while over-delivering in execution. I’ve always enjoyed looking at where we can go, finding a way to get there, and making sure we achieve our objective.
Creating a vision, identifying new markets, new market trends and new business opportunities is exciting. Turning all of these into reality is gratifying, especially when that reality involves helping customers become successful while growing Oracle’s business. Doing this well, is hard work, but can deliver tremendous results.
During my days of university study in Computer Sciences, the world of technology was very, very different than today. Through the intervening years, while so much has changed, some key elements still remain true. Although it may sound old fashioned, a key tenant to my work life, is customer first. If we do what is right for our customer, over the long term, it will be good for Oracle.
Where I am now, is a direct result of where I have been, and the sum of the experiences along the way. The businesses that I am proud to lead are all about helping our customers and Oracle drive new business, into new markets, with new technologies, always with a strong focus on making everything real.
Some years back, all threads started to converge into a single direction and an idea formed. Turning my ideas into a vision, establishing that vision, justifying the investment, building the businesses and then leading those businesses to success became a passion for me.
Delivering on a vision by driving these ideas from conception into successful reality has been a wild ride. I have the honor, privilege and global responsibility for driving the Oracle Modernization and Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions businesses and accountability for delivering results. The size, scale and success of these businesses is a direct result of the dedication and hard work of the highly skilled, talented and intelligent people not only within my team, but those across other divisions and from external partners that comprise the ecosystem supporting these businesses.
Oracle Modernization
Oracle Modernization is focused on enabling companies to strategically transform their business into a more agile, cost efficient, and profitable business, by modernizing their legacy IT systems with Complete, Open and Integrated business solutions from Oracle. This is achieved by leveraging current content and investment, to create a highly integrated solution that blends what you have, with what you need.
Our objective is to provide tactical solutions within a strategic framework, breaking down the larger complex problem, into discrete and manageable challenges. For each individual challenge, the best solution is determined and comprises a combination of products from within the broad spectrum of Oracle’s Applications, Middleware and Technology software portfolio.
To accomplish our objectives, we follow a consultative solution sales approach, always working in conjunction with the local Oracle account team. The Oracle Modernization Sales team provides valuable subject matter expertise that includes both business and technical domains, We work with business leaders to identify their business goals, objectives, needs and requirements. From there, we help drive those business needs into reality by transitioning technology from systems that no longer meet business needs, into solutions that meet, or exceed the needs of current and future business requirements. A key to success is creating a high level strategy and roadmap along with execution plans that manage/balance risk, change and cost, to deliver maximum business value/benefit at whatever pace best suits the business. The resulting solutions are based on open systems, open standards and an open architecture, thus providing a solid foundation for the future.
Partners play an important role by providing discrete modernization tools and technologies, as well as services to implement the modernization solutions. The Oracle Modernization Partner Solution team is responsible for building and maintaining the Oracle Modernization Alliance (part of the comprehensive Oracle Partner Network), an alliance of best-of-breed modernization vendors.
From initial engagement, through successful implementation, the Oracle Modernization Sales team will lead and guide the process, leveraging the entire breadth and depth of Oracle, and the Oracle Modernization ecosystem as and when appropriate.
You can find more detail about Oracle Modernization here on Oracle.com.
Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions
Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions is a business development engine focused on delivering high value, integrated solutions with Oracle software (Applications, Middleware, Technology) on IBM Servers, using best practices based upon Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture and Application Integration Architecture, and years of experience.
As part of Oracle’s ongoing efforts to grow into new markets, with new technologies, the team provides sales education about Oracle for Linux on IBM System z to Oracle, IBM and other business partners and customer education through Design Workshops.
The Oracle/IBM Integrated Solution team provides sales support with subject matter expertise, covering a broad spectrum of topics to ensure that customers can make intelligent and informed decisions as they deploy their Oracle software based solutions.
Backing up that sales support, is the Oracle/IBM Integrated Solutions Center, a team of expert engineers, staffed by Oracle and IBM. This team defines reference architectures, determines best practices, provides hands on training, and runs Proof of Concepts to validate solution functional delivery They also validate that proposed solutions will deliver in the real world by executing Test to Scale projects that ensure our solutions meet or exceed customers service level objectives related to performance, throughput, high availability and disaster recovery.
Summary
Modernization is on the minds of just about every IT professional these days meaning that there is still a substantial amount of work to do. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a many talented and dedicated people, our businesses continue to thrive and deliver strong value/benefit to our customers.
I appreciate this opportunity to tell you a bit about myself and the businesses that I have had the pleasure of developing and managing at Oracle and look forward to sharing more exciting details with you in the near future.
