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OpenWorld Attendees Get Inside Look into the World of Oracle's CIO
In a packed session at the November 2007 OpenWorld conference, Oracle CIO Mark Sunday offered a peek inside Oracle's Global IT organization—and how he leverages his real-world experience to create and optimize Oracle's own products and services, working side-by-side with Oracle On Demand.
While Sunday's job description is in many ways like his peers, he has additional tasks that cut to the heart of Oracle's business. For example, he is expected to provide his real-world know-how in implementing and managing Oracle solutions to help drive new product capabilities, as well as to establish best practices that maximize customer ROI.
Rapid M&A Integrations
Since coming to Oracle when Siebel was acquired in early 2006, Sunday has presided over a period of rapid mergers and acquisitions—a challenge that many Oracle customers also face. His goal: to create what he calls a "global, virtual organization."
"In the last three years, Oracle has rapidly and successfully integrated more than 30 acquisitions, including seven in the last four months," said Sunday. "To make that happen, integration has to begin on Day One."
In most cases, integration has been measured in days and weeks rather than months, said Sunday, thanks to a successful strategy of global shared services, such as consolidating disparate internal service operations onto a single platform and set of processes built around established best practices.
And what has been a guiding principle for Sunday?
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and change amid order," said Sunday, quoting mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Proving Ground for Oracle On Demand
Sunday ended his presentation by asking Mike Beck, senior vice president of On Demand Global Delivery, to shed some light on how his organization works with customers to meet many of the same challenges that Oracle faces.
"It's a win-win for Oracle customers," Beck said. "The software gets better and better, and we continuously improve our service delivery. Leveraging Oracle's global IT infrastructure and team that runs it, we are able to bring our customers' environments back to where their software is first developed and deployed," said Beck. "By letting Oracle manage its software, customers rapidly benefit from our best practices to accelerate business results, lower risk, and reduce costs."
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