Safra A. Catz Quotes
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It's critical to simplify and run the business in such a way that resources are released to invest in your main business.
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At Oracle, silver medal is first loser.
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Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.
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Digital India is about empowering the citizen - it's mobile, it's cloud, it's storage - we are in all those areas.
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A core focus of our effort is based on the recognition that our customers have varying needs, and one of their most important needs is to have choice.
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We provide business advice and guidance. We started it here in India first, and now we have taken it globally. India was the first for startup incubation in the world for us.
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Even in large corporations, smaller ideas may not get enough resources.
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I teach at the Stanford Business School, and about half of my students are foreign, many of whom, I hope, will stay and build businesses in U.S. But I must tell you that they also have opportunities to come back to India and start great companies and operations.
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I like to say it's an attitude of not just thinking outside the box, but not even seeing the box.
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The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.
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I literally went down to my car and thought, 'Oh my God, SAP bought Concur - maybe tomorrow they'll buy Dairy Queen.' It was the best thing that happened to me on the day I was named CEO of Oracle.
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Hardware ultimately is a scale game, and it's a differentiation game. If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that?
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What happened in the past can help you know what's going to happen in the future. That insight brings a next level of intelligence not just to sales and marketing but to ERP, where you can save more money in procurement or figure out whether the people you recruit are going to be successful in your organization.
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We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
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Managers used to say, 'I have a gut feeling.' Do you know what a gut feeling is for a professional manager? It's a pattern that they recognize. But if your system can recognize that pattern, if it's not just a couple of managers who know that pattern, then the system's gut feeling can tell you which way to go. That's really liberating.
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The demographic of young people... in each hand is a phone, more powerful than a computer. It's a doorway to the digital nation, to education.
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The fact is that our business is fundamentally really strong. We have a platform and a depth that no one in the tech industry has. This means we have competitors at every layer.
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What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.
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Whether you're a government entity, a large enterprise, or a startup, a true digital transformation takes advantage of technology to focus on the customer, automates work that does not need manual interference, and unleashes your people to truly make decisions that change the path of your company.
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Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.
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In the cloud, customers don't want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.
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When we do acquisitions, we decide what we want. We decide what fills a hole. And if the price is too high, our alternative is the $5 billion we spend on R&D every year. We're not well-known for overpaying, because at Oracle we always have an alternative.
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As much as people say they love change, they love it when you change - not when you want them to change. Even when it comes to processes they don't like, they're afraid of change.
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I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.