The Long Reach of Oracle’s Larry Ellison

What an article, it shows you how much influence Oracle has had on the software industry, you might say that Oracle has actually legitimized the software industry at a time whwn software is mostly created and sold by hardware vendors alongside their proprietary hardware.

My other point is how would Oracle have look like now if Larry was not such a replusive person, all these industry leaders (see the article) were at Oracle, they left to create or run some of the world's most interesting software vendors like Siebel and salesforce.com ..

Take a look it is here:
allthingsd.com/20110730/the-long-reach-o...acles-larry-ellison/

Certainly whether we like Larry or not, he is the man behind a whole industry, the enterprise software industry. Oracle has many issues, pushy sales practices, discounting practices, aggressive acquisitions and many more but on the other hand it has always had an impressive product line up and it is much more organized compared to any other major IT vendor.

What an interesting amount of influence this man has had on the industry .. does not mean I like him though.

The man has added so much to IT .. where would we be without relational databases and SQL? and look at the long list of IT executives who grew up in Oracle ..

Not popular yes but very influential.

He is probably the most influential person on IT in the last 20 years (does not mean I like him).

I know this will become a gig debate but I will be happy to discuss it!

I think the big test for Larry is Sun.
Will Oracle manage to put its hardware business really on the map, will they be able to compete effectively with IBM and HP, will they be able to capture the imagination of the masses like Sun did long ago?