A Solid Foundation
Jeff Henley is Chairman of Oracle. He has held that position since January of 2004.
by Margaret Terry Lindquist, July 2007
Jeff Henley has been chairman of Oracle Corporation since June 2004, but his history with the company goes back much farther. For 13 years, starting in 1991, he was Oracle's chief financial officer and an executive vice president. He has been a member of Oracle's board of directors since June 1995 and a member of the executive committee since July 1995. His perspective on Oracle's history of innovation and where the company is heading is an invaluable look at the structure of Oracle.
PROFIT: You joined Oracle in March 1991, at a time when it was going through a difficult period in terms of financial management. What had to happen to turn the company around?
HENLEY: The first year or two after I joined was really a case of a classic turnaround. I worked with Larry Ellison, and we made a lot of management changes around the world. We brought in more experienced, senior-level managers to run the business in a lot of different countries. We brought in a new head of sales. We got our business practices to where they needed to be, cleaned up our balance sheet, got our financing organized—all the classic stuff.
But the thing that saved the company was the Oracle7 database, which we launched in June 1992. We had cleaned up the company, and a lot of the basics were in place. But without a great product, you're not going to get anywhere. Oracle came up with some really great new features that put us back in the driver's seat. After that, our database business caught fire and the company was making money again. We continued to grow nicely in the 1990s—30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent a year—and that was something that we could sustain.
PROFIT: The next big change for the company was the
globalization effort, which started in the late 1990s. How did that play into the growth of Oracle?
HENLEY: The globalization effort was a huge transformation that got us very well situated for the next big steps we wanted to take. It took about five years to go to a global single instance, global processes, and shared service centers. It was a dramatic cultural change for a lot of our country subsidiaries. But it improved our profits enormously. It gave us much better information because we could put all of our information in one place. It also gave us better governance and better quality controls and made it much easier when we became acquisitive to start bringing these new companies into Oracle.
PROFIT: Web services and service-oriented architecture were the next big transformations to hit the industry. How did Oracle keep up with these trends?
HENLEY: Service-oriented architecture is the next big transformation, after the internet—it's the hot technology now. A lot of the acquisitions that we've made in the past three years really strengthened our position in the middleware area, particularly around service-oriented architecture. Our customers are seeing those capabilities as allowing them to get additional leverage with some of their legacy systems—helping them past some of the integration challenges that they're facing. It's an evolutionary step ahead, I believe, in terms of developing software that adds additional benefit to the customer.
