This has the makings of a decent revenge story, or at least a tech giant face-off.
Charles Phillips, who in 2010 left Oracle as co-president, has been making the rounds in his capacity as chief executive of Infor, a much smaller company that he joined soon after leaving Oracle. After a long period of quiet, he now says Infor has remade itself into a company that will give his old employer a really hard time.
“Oracle is big, but it’s focused on trying to put together a system of hardware, and it is confusing as a software company,†he said in an interview “On applications, they are easier to beat than SAP.†Oh, and he plans to beat SAP too, but there’s little doubt that he is aiming to make life hard for Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive and his old boss.
The bluster is backed up by some interesting developments. Oracle has a core business in selling relational databases to big companies that few expect to dislodge in anybody’s working life. But over the past decadeOracle has also spent billions buying all kinds of old-line applications companies, computer hardware in the form of Sun Microsystems, and more recently cloud-based applications providers in areas like human resources and talent management.
It is a lot to try to make sense of, but it is certainly big. Oracle’s applications business alone had revenue of about $10 billion in its fiscal 2012, and another $16 billion in updates and support. In the last four quarters Infor grossed less than $3 billion. From that angle, it’s barely a fair fight.
But Mr. Phillips said Infor, which has its own collection of smaller software companies, has spent the past seven years rewriting big industry-specific applications from older software languages into .Net and Java, which can be used in contemporary deployments of cloud computing and mobile devices. “It took 4000 developers and contractors, 1000 of them hired just in the past year,†he said. “It’s expensive, there’s no question.
Infor! has also built some very attractive and easy-to-use interfaces for mobile devices, and a kind of social networking software that stays close to solving business problems. The plan is to attack companies in a dozen industries, like hospitals and automobiles, targeting companies with revenue between $500 million and $10 billion in revenue - the kind of places that don’t draw Oracle’s top salesmen, and can’t afford big customization projects.
The idea is that Infor will grow in a relatively unattended part of the market, while Oracle and SAP fight with each other for bigger accounts. Mr. Phillips plans to add a new industry every 18 months, eventually, growing a company big enough to be a threat to the giants.
That would be sweet for Mr. Phillips, who was effectively pushed aside to make way for Mark Hurd after Mr. Hurd resigned from Hewlett-Packard and became Oracle’s co-president. Mr. Phillips also said he’d been frustrated carrying out a similar software modernization project at Oracl.. “We tried to integrate the applications, but we couldn’t get funding,†he said.
Mr. Phillips’ biggest worry may not be Oracle at all, however, but newer cloud-based companies like Workday, which offer an increasing range of enterprise applications to large companies and small.
“Anyone can do human resources and financials,†he said, a comment on Workday’s core offerings. “We’ve hired experts in things like automotive design, or how to make a global brewery’s beer taste the same everywhere in the world, how to bake bread at any altitude.†That kind of industry-specific knowledge offered cheap, he said, will spell victory.
