What I’ve Learned From My (Last) Five Years at Oracle

When Oracle acquired NetSuite, the company I co-founded with Larry Ellison (yes, that Larry Ellison!), most folks probably figured I’d do my time until my full package vested and then drive off into the sunset.

Yet here I still am, five years later, and I have to say both companies are better off for the deal, as we share an incredibly bright future and a passion for our customers. That is why I’m still here. 

When I first started at Oracle in 1987 (yes, it was so long ago that the internet wasn’t a big thing yet, applications were not supposed to work on mobile devices, and social is what you did after work with a drink in your hand), Oracle was more of a developer-focused company. It began its life in the database realm, a product built by developers, for developers. The idea that you had to cater your product to the needs of a business user wouldn’t have crossed our minds at the time.

That’s why, when I returned to Oracle five years ago, I was surprised how much had changed.

At NetSuite, our vision has always been to help customers achieve THEIR vision by providing cloud applications that help them grow their businesses—manage their finances, manufacturing, distribution, and people. We’ve done business, as you can see from this video, with more than a dollop of humor.

Oracle has been in applications for more than 30 years, but it’s really been in the past five that I've seen a mind shift among Oracle developers and designers, whereby their focus is on what the technology is going to look like to the end user.

A mutually beneficial arrangement

When Oracle was considering acquiring NetSuite, it was already undergoing a cloud transformation, and I think they saw us as an accelerant of trends that had already been percolating internally. 

Oracle saw the importance of putting the user experience at the forefront, especially when it came to business applications, and they rightly believed we would be able to share our experience. 

And at NetSuite, we had an innate understanding of business users because our customers were entrepreneurs whose companies were growing rapidly and needed simple technology tools—not more complexity.

Our partnership is truly a two-way street. As much as we’ve been able to complement Oracle’s transition to a cloud company of the first order, Oracle has helped us grow beyond anything we could have done on our own.

For example, Oracle is doing a tremendous amount of R&D in AI and machine learning, and we’re all leveraging that work to help customers uncover patterns buried in their data, automate rote work, and just get their jobs done easier and faster. 

Another area where Oracle has been crucial to accelerating our growth is with our cloud infrastructure. We’re now running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, giving us the opportunity to expand worldwide much more quickly while allowing us to make use of Oracle's most powerful database technology, from which we're only now really starting to see the benefits. 

All the while, I think Oracle has done a great job of allowing us to retain our independence and our culture—our secret sauce.

Ushering in the future together

I can see us developing features that benefit both Oracle and traditional NetSuite customers. For example, applications used to file an expense report in a 100-person company or in a 10,000-person company have a major similarity: Users don't want to do it, so the less they have to do, the better. If they could just snap a picture of their receipts as part of an automated process, that experience would appeal to employees of big and small companies alike.

There are a lot of areas like that where Oracle and NetSuite are working together to simplify and improve the lives of business users.

The past five years have gone by incredibly quickly, even adjusting for the pain and dislocation we just experienced with the pandemic. I’m excited about the next five years. I’m still driven by the same mission I had when Larry Ellison and I started NetSuite, which is to help businesses unify their information so they can accomplish their goals and change the world in their own ways. 

That mission is what drove us in 1998, in 2016 when Oracle acquired us, and it’s what drives us today and will drive us tomorrow.