Safra A. Catz Quotes
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I learn from Larry Ellison every day. I've said this before: how is it to work with someone who thinks out of the box? Larry doesn't see the walls at all; he does not see the box. He is an absolute, true visionary. And to be honest, I always find myself in a box! I'm comfy in my box. I've furnished it; it's lovely.
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My dream job was to work in an ice cream shop. Two weeks and five pounds later, I realized it wasn't for me. For many years, I had planned to be a corporate lawyer. As luck would have it, other than a summer internship, I didn't end up doing that either.
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In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business.
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My greatest inspiration is my mother, the bravest person I ever knew. She overcame incredible odds, worked while raising two kids, and made it all look incredibly simple. Even in her final days succumbing to cancer, she fought like a champion.
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It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.
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The truth is that technology is only valuable if it helps you run your organization better.
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SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases.
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There are so many immigrant-led success stories in the United States, and the fact that it's gotten so much harder for educated folks to stay here is really unfortunate.
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The Indian market is potentially the largest market in the world with the leadership at both central and state level focused on leapfrogging into the future.
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Hopefully in the future, generational challenges will be measured by achievement, not gender.
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Digital India is the only way for citizen empowerment, which can bring government transparency and accountability to citizens.
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The worst decision, hands down, was wearing bright yellow when I was 9 months pregnant. I looked like a bumble bee. I have not worn yellow since.
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Oracle is obsessed with security. It's an absolute requirement for all our products. The real security issue is when customers take older products that were not built for the Internet, and kind of rack them and put them on the Internet.
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Oracle is my second job ever that did not involve waitressing. But I still have my waitress apron just in case this does not work out. It's just that I fell in love with software when I was programming in college. When I was an investment banker, there were mostly mainframe companies and very few software ones.
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The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.
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Microsoft does platform, not really infrastructure, and they do a little bit of Saas.
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Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.
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If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name.
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First of all, we have infrastructure as a service, which Amazon has; we have platform as a service, which Microsoft has; we have software as a service; we have applications. Nobody has everything except us. We also have data as a service.
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In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.
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I know firsthand the complexities of leading an enterprise through business and technology transformation. It takes intense focus, a strong drive, and a clearly communicated vision to inspire and take an organization from where they are, to where they need to be - or where they want to go.
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Common sense will always prevail. America will advance the agenda for the greatest minds.
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My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.
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It is not a coincidence that Fusion middleware and applications have the same name. We knew what we needed it to be.