SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Hurd, co-president of the Oracle Corporation, has a big Starbucks coffee in a cold room in the Moscone Center. That’s how he likes a room, cold. He’s focused that way.
Other people can have fuel, too: urns of convention coffee, as well as Pepsi, bottled water, water in pitchers and ice. There is orange juice on more ice. At 8:30 in the morning Mr. Hurd’s security guy packs two spare boxes of Altoids. Mr. Hurd is going through his first box fast, maybe because at the start of another nonstop day there’s already more coffee, and talk.
There is always lots more talk. There are a lot of contracts to win, a lot of people to meet, a lot of common ground to find and needs to address when you’re at Oracle and looking for almost $720 million in revenue a week, every week of the year.
“Are we giving you everything you want?” he asks the chief information officer for one of the world’s largest agricultural companies. “It’s important to us to be with companies like yours, global companies.”
The two talk about executives they have each worked with over the years, searching for common ground. Mr. Hurd needs a big contract, of course, and talks about how Oracle is investing millions in research dollars to improve its products. But just as much, Oracle needs global exposure, and Mr. Hurd needs people who will testify to other big buyers on his behalf.
“References drive the industry,” Mr. Hurd tells the executive. “Customers want to talk to other customers.” They talk about analytic software, manufacturing software, building markets in Asia, Africa and the United States.
“We need to win this,” he says in parting.
A few hours watching Mr. Hurd (something Oracle allowed me to do on the condition that some negotiations and customers not be identified) is a healthy reminder of a basic truth about the technology industry. The world sees and thinks about its gee-whiz products. It loses sight of the reality that sales make all the rest possible.
Oracle became big in its 36 years thanks to one of the strongest sales cultures in technology. You can find so many of its former sales executives throughout the industry that sometimes is seems like the Valley’s finishing school for deals. And whatever the business, sales still is all about relationships.
In the course of Oracle OpenWorld, the enterprise technology industry’s largest gathering, Mr. Hurd sees 575 customers over three and a half days. There are back-to-back one-on-ones as in the Moscone Center and group visits with industrial sectors at the Fairmont Hotel, one of dozens of hotels Oracle commandeers for the event.
There are walk-throughs past the 500 partners on the show floor, cheering sessions with Mr. Hurd’s 2,500 biggest buyers, and quiet moments with representatives of the Oracle User Group, a customer organization of 550,000 members. There are speeches to tens of thousands of attendees, and backstage meetings between rock stars and a few lucky executives. Another 2.1 million people watch Mr. Hurd and other Oracle executives via the Web.
It’s a heavy pace, but not that abnormal in Mr. Hurd’s life, says Julie Tung, Oracle’s vice president for global customer programs. “We aim to be out five weeks a quarter, generally three days of the week with customers,” she says. ”The target goal is 50 customers a day, with no more than 18 people if it is a round table, so they all feel like they’ve had some one-on-one time with Mark.”
Ms. Tung lives in New Jersey and Mr. Hurd is based in California, but it hardly matters when you are getting up close and personal with 3,575 customers a year.
“People underestimate the importance of going to the market in tech,” says Joseph Tucci, the chief executive of EMC, a data storage company with $22 billion in revenue and a reputation for hard-charging sales that rivals Oracle’s. “The industry is in tremendous transformation, and you can’t ever play any defense.”
Mr. Tucci, who lives in Boston, had the stage at OpenWorld for about 20 minutes one morning, as part of a sponsorship that cost him more than $1 million. He was back on a plane within hours, after a couple of customer visits.
Fish Oil and The Black Keys
Inside Moscone, a man from a maker of nutritional supplements, a company not one-tenth as large as the agricultural company, brings Mr. Hurd a basket with fish oil and medicine for aging joints as a present. “What are you trying to tell me?” Mr. Hurd, a star college athlete, jokes as he holds it aloft with his fingertips.
In truth, he does sound a little hoarse, but he has for years. It may be a product of nonstop urging, imploring, connecting, sometimes chewing out and sometimes cheering.
There’s coffee. They talk about people they both know, how demanding but fair these people can be.
Mr. Hurd hears from the executive how Oracle’s data-crunching software might not mean just $15 million in sales to this company. The supplements company, which also distributes what it makes, is partly owned by a big private equity firm. Maybe it can help with sales to other companies in the equity firm’s stable?
“You need anything, call me,” Mr. Hurd says as they both get up, and Mr. Hurd makes sure the man is well fixed for that night’s private concert with Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. He mentions a few bigger stars he’s met backstage, and some more who will be playing at a future Oracle event.
Oracle is the world’s largest maker of business software, with $37.2 billion in sales last year (some of that is computers, too, mostly as high-performing conveyances for the software). That is more than $715 million in sales a week to be even on the year, and another $29 million a week in new revenue in order to hit 4 percent growth, the amount that revenue increased in Oracle’s first fiscal quarter.
That increase may sound poky compared with Oracle’s best days, unless you have tried finding $29 million in new spending every week, all year long, in a slow-growing world.
For all the pace and numbers, though, there is one message. “The bad news is, we have 400,000 customers,” Mr. Hurd says to representatives of an insurance company. “I can’t get 400,000 more. We want to cross-sell like crazy, same as you.”
It is not just that the world economy is, at best, in a period of slow growth. Almost every buyer, no matter where, is under extreme pressure to cut information technology spending. At the same time, that buyer must bring engineers, product developers and sales representatives more innovative, insightful and easier to use software, so they can scare up their own new revenue.
Their answer is to consolidate computer hardware and software in so-called cloud data centers, which are cheaper and easier to run. Instead of the personal computers that used to carry Oracle’s financial, manufacturing and human resources software, though, they are serving up applications to a hodgepodge of cheaper smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Oracle has hustled to build its own cloud capabilities in the three years since Mr. Hurd joined, but so has SAP, its old nemesis. Worse, upstarts like Salesforce.com and Workday created their businesses to run on the cloud. Their businesses are a fraction the size of Oracle, but last quarter Salesforce’s revenue was up 31 percent. Workday’s revenue last quarter was about what Oracle gets in a day, but the company grew 72 percent from a year earlier.
Into a tough market, Mr. Hurd, alongside Safra Catz, the co-president who handles much of Oracle’s balance sheet, and Lawrence Ellison, Oracle’s founder, chief executive and top technologist, has built a sales strategy that aims to attack as much of the market as possible.
Build out broad technologies, Oracle’s strategy goes, like databases big enough to capture most of the world’s information. Modernize Oracle’s 100 existing software applications and find ways to make sure they are simplifying things — not making them more difficult — for customers. On top of all that, build special practices in global businesses, like utilities, health care and financial services, which have a lot of different processes — but unlike, say, the oil business, also have a lot of different companies in them. Build out specialty consulting, research and consulting practices. Maybe pray.
“Most tech companies do one trick and die,” Mr. Hurd says privately. “If you can do two or three or four, that’s where wealth gets created.” Part of his goal, it goes unstated, is to score customers before Salesforce, Workday and other coming threats manage to learn their second and third tricks
Oracle’s recent growth results (and not matter how big you are, it’s about more growth) are better than those at comparable giants like Accenture, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard or several other companies. Mr. Hurd has committed their results — and others’ — to memory, and will talk about them unbidden. National economic statistics of several countries roll off as easily.
Like many top executives, Mr. Hurd seems to enjoy mastering a complexity of sales, technologies and competitors. He likes talking numbers, preferably with a whiteboard or a flip chart to draw on, almost as much as he likes talking to customers.
Most of the food is ignored. Nobody really likes that. It’s just there if someone wants it, a sales courtesy. Outside, at the OpenWorld conference, though, 60,000 people will consume 48,000 gallons of water, 98,000 sodas, 49,000 juices and 150,000 cups of coffee over three days.
Mr. Hurd rides a smoke-windowed Cadillac S.U.V., seriously chilled, from far inside Moscone though back streets, ascending Nob Hill to the Fairmont Hotel. As soon as the Cadillac moves, all turn to their cellphones and tablets, racing to stay even with e-mails of deals, more reports, more schedule changes.
In the e-mails are more résumés from old friends at troubled competitors. Everywhere in this industry transition to the cloud, there is a sense that in a few years there won’t be as many of the old giants around. As much as there is the importance of relationships, there is the importance of survival.
“It takes time,” Mr. Hurd says. “I.B.M. is still worth $200 billion. SAP is a little under $100 billion. We’re $170 billion. There’s money in the old stuff, but there’s more wealth created in the new growth areas.”
An Anonymous Room on Nob Hill
The Fairmont is the most ornate and storied hotel in San Francisco. Mr. Hurd goes straight to another anonymous room. There’s coffee and computers, and across one wall a screen of the starting line to the America’s Cup. Oracle’s catamaran will stage a historic comeback over Emirates New Zealand for the world championship. There are SunChips, pretzels and caramel corn; tea, juice, and more soda for Mr. Hurd and the customers. It’s chilly.
He sees the insurance guys, and goes to other rooms for group meetings. There are fruit and granola bars for 15 people from the utilities business, hard candy for the military and government agencies, and candy bars and fruit for 75 retail executives.
Along with finance, retailing is, according to most observers, one of the hottest markets for analytic and predictive Big Data software. While bankers have a lot of money and are looking for any edge they can get, retailers have lots of customer data and a continual need to raise profit margins.
Oracle won the America’s Cup, Mr. Hurd tells the retailers, because it switched out the intermediary between the ship’s captain and the small powerboat behind the big catamaran, which held Oracle’s most powerful computers. The machine was crunching millions of data points about waves, currents, wind and speed, in real time. The man was making sense of it for his boss.
If there is a parallel there for these technologists to grasp about themselves, their markets and their own companies, Mr. Hurd leaves it for them to draw on their own. He has to move. There are executives from Japan. There is a big customer dinner. There’s backstage with Maroon 5, a couple of songs, and back to the hotel, because there’s tomorrow.
Clearly, though, the race and the comeback resonate with him as well.
Mr. Ellison, who ditched much of Oracle OpenWorld for his beloved boat, never gave up hope, Mr. Hurd says, even when Oracle was down 8-1 in the nine-race series.
“Last Saturday he still thought there was a chance,” Mr. Hurd says. “You just win one race at a time.”