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Oracle CFO Leaves after Four Months of Service
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle's CFO and Co-President Greg Maffei has quit. He will be succeeded by Safra Catz, who has been with Oracle for a while, and it will be interesting to see how long she lasts. Before Maffei, Harry You was CFO for 9 months, and before him was Jeff Henley. What's with the CFO shuffle at Oracle?"
CFO's earn so much that 9 months are enough for the rest of their life.
When the CFO leaves, it's usually because they think they're in a sinking ship.
"Larry"
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
To quote that annoying Sit-and-sleep commercial finance guy:
You're killing me, Larry!!!!!!!!!!
"What's with the CFO shuffle at Oracle?" We didn't mean to cause any trouble; We're just doin' the CFO Shuffle.
Maybe they can't find a CFO that will cook the books just right?
CFOs depart quickly because they see tyranical leadership, bad financial situation, or both. Sounds like there are some serious problems in Oracle's financial sector.
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
I imagine Oracle's financials are like a messy kitchen. Cleaning it doesn't sound like too bad of a job until you actually walk in and see it... Yes, I live in a bachelor pad.
If it ain't broke, it needs more features!
Um, wild guess here: Larry Ellison?
What's with the CFO shuffle at Oracle?
Oh, nothing more than fear of doing jail time.
Seriously, after Tyco, WorldCom and Enron, a CFO that is asked to support accounting that might be considered questionable bears some serious risks (as they should). The compensation just does not justify the risk of jail time. At least not for your typical CFO.
Posting anonymously 'cause I still want a job...
I've been consulting for Oracle for a couple years now and I'm not surprised by this. I get reorg'ed every three months at the minimum, I can't count the number of managers I've had since I've been working here - most know my name only by my expense reports. Every so often my cell phone rings and the voice on the other end says "Hi, I'm ****, your new manager." Why would it be any different in the adminisphere?
I've worked for companies big and small over the years and while the job has its good points, the constant turnover isn't one of them
Companies are now competiting for the CEOs and COOs with the craziest names. I mean "Safra Catz", what are you kidding me?
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
I'm just wondering why there wasn't someone in the CFO's department that could have stood in so the analyst's day and Oracle's presence at the Goldman's investment conference could have gone off without a hitch.
Hey, Maffei - that's Microsoft's old money wizard... if he's jumping ship that's not a good sign.
"Larry" doesn't suffer fools.
That doesn't make any sense.
Hasn't anyone told you to fuck off before?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
...does it run Lunix?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The AOL founder quit, too!
Or does Ellison talk like a girl? Maybe a female CFO will be safe in his closet.
So my guess is that either the CFOs feel bad about selling incredibly overpriced products, or they just plain don't understand how the hell they can manage all these crazy contracts.
When Microsoft licensing is the low-cost alternative to your product, there is something terribly wrong.
lucm, indeed.
It's very simple. CFO stands for "Chief of Fucking Off." Their job is to get hired, sit around for a few days, and then fuck off and look somewhere else for a job.
Sounds like most of the programmers I've worked with over the years. Similar to the sysadmins too, however they download porn instead of looking for jobs.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Harry You
There's gotta be a joke in there somewhere.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
> You was CFO for 9 months
What? No I wasn't.
For some reason the CFOs have found it disturbing that Larry expects them to cut off their pinky if there are profit warnings :)
It seems that you're suggesting that Oracle is getting SGI'ed. Is that the case? Perhaps. There are now several competitors to its product, and what was once unique from them is now far more common. However, there are many companies that have invested huge sums of money in Oracle products, and nothing is going to change that fact. Oracle will most likely be around for a while.
It will be interesting to see if Oracle eventually goes the way of SGI, or if they manage to pull a Sun and revive themselves before it's too late.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"MySQL"!
Chief Fuck Over?
One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
First rule of Oracle: Larry Ellison is God. You are not God. Disagreements with God will be answered by plagues.
Maybe they couldn't stand the financial package... ;)
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Oracle CFO Leaves after Four Months of Service.
He must have finally gotten a database up and running.
The ______ Agenda
I am wondering if anyone has information on how compensation, particularily any exit bonuses he received. There have been rumors about layoffs lately, so I would be apalled if the money he took would be enough to fund those employees.
Considering that PostGres and SQL Server have the same Berkeley roots, I'm going to have to disagree there.
SQL Server and PostGres are at about the same level as far as sophistication goes. SQL Server wins in the ease of administration department, but lags flexibility and openness.
As far as "just being an SQL 92 RDBMS" running on a SMP (but single image system), all three systems are at the same level. (That means any ignoring any specific clustering/dev frameworks/warehousing stuff)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Q - What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A - God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
As a programmer I take offense to this...
:)
I spend most of my day playing solitaire... and mild pr0n usage... only the days when the hot secretary isn't there to bend over in front of me all the time... mmm yummy
The big change here is Sarbanes Oxley. Post SOX, keeping CFOs at any company is tougher, and I think more so for tech companies whose accounting by nature is less concrete. This has a huge impact for geeks because it also puts a relatively larger burden on small companies (there's about two mil. a year to be paid regardless of how big you are). So more of us will end up working at supermegasoft and less at smaller, friendlier companies than would have sans SOX.
Where is the spam that goes along with this filter beating paragraph?
Or, maybe it takes from four to nine months to shovel to the bottom of the accounting muck at Oracle. At that point, a CFO reaches the inescapable conclusion that they must either:
1. Issue a radical restatement of earnings for one or more previous quarters in their next financial report.
2. Commit perjury.
If the CEO and board disagree with the necessity of revising past financial statements, and the CFO doesn't feel like taking his chances with committing fraud (especially in the current post-scandel atmosphere), then it's time to shop for a new CFO. At the least, it will give the higher-ups a few more months to inconspicuously sell some stock while the next CFO's still busy shoveling.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"So my guess is that either the CFOs feel bad about selling incredibly overpriced products"
I think it's much more likely he felt bad about doing some jail time. Not a good sign for Oracle's shareholders.
"Please do not eat CFO Shuffle"
OMFG WOW TAHT AER TEH FUNNAYEST!!!!11111
Oh wait, actually, that made NO sense at all. Would someone please care to explain how this arbitrary string of words got modded +5 Funny? Is there some long-running "do not eat _______" joke on slashdot akin to the "in soviet russia _______" joke?
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tv/sat-night-live/commerc ials/
Much funnier stuff when you don't have to explain the pop culture reference
Oh wait, actually, that made NO sense at all. Would someone please care to explain how this arbitrary string of words got modded +5 Funny? Is there some long-running "do not eat _______" joke on slashdot akin to the "in soviet russia _______" joke?
iPod shuffle
Notice the comparison to the packs of gum beside the first paragraph. Unfortunately they've removed it now, but one of the footnotes at the bottom of the page used to say, "Do not eat iPod shuffle."
Apparently in the UK it said do not chew instead.
http://www.donoteatipodshuffle.com/
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Oracle: The company that sold the state of California more licenses than its entire work force. *
I had fun when I bought an Oracle license for our developers, and got a follow-up call from a sales rep explaining why I hadn't actually bought a valid license. After I explained exactly how we were testing and considering deploying Oracle, he went into hilarious detail about how much the licenses we needed would cost. Actually, at first he just alluded to all the different aspects of licensing we needed to worry about, but I pressed him for a quote, and he got back to me a few days later with a quote that took him a while to explain. All of this for the smallest possible dev environment.
I began this saying that I had fun. The fun part was saying truthfully, "Obviously then, we won't be developing any product with Oracle. There are other databases that will meet our needs."
I'll bet their salesmen get a lot of un-sales that way.
* Turns out that California was not unusual. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-923127.html
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
were that true you would have included a link.
you still can.
A blog about stuff.
That's quite funny!
... a sign that the Siebel takeover was a bad deal?
Is he the scapegoat for this deal?
My father used to work for oracle, just had a chat to him about this. Stuff like this used to happen all the time. Apparently Larry Ellison used to (don't know if this is still the case) offer people huge ammounts of stock options to get them to join Oracle then fire them just before they could use them just so they couldn't. I hear that Seibel has a simlar problem, the longest a CEO would last is 9-18 months.
At the time my father was working the joke going around was:
Q: What's the definiton of an optimist?
A: An Oracle employee who irons 5 shirts on a Sunday
Guess this still holds true
Also there was a book called "What's the differance between Larry Ellison and God?" with the tag line: God dosen't think he's Larry Ellison!
Two words: Larry Ellison.
Where I work it's a mixed environment. We have some applications that require either big iron 12 and 16 way Sun boxes running Oracle 10g. We have other applications that require the high availability and scalability of Oracle RAC distributed across several RHAS nodes. We also have internal applications that actually perform better with SleepyCat (BDB) running locally and replicating to failover nodes. There are also lots of web based applications that hum along just fine with MySQL and PostgreSQL as their data stores. The mainframe has a few DB2 instances and some of the (rare) MS Windows apps tend to use MSSQL servers in failover clusters.
Point being, use the right DB for the right purpose. Oracle is a niche player on the higher end of the cost, reliability and performance scale and we use it for those needs. Of course, the skillset in the DBA group is varied as well. They usually specialize in one product and back someone (or 2) up on other DBMS.
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
What's with the CFO shuffle at Oracle?"
Two words...
Larry Ellison
Oracle was once highly regarded and apparently had a product that justified it, but it seems like they've been coasting on their reputation and CxO MEGO factor ("Oracle costs millions of dollars, surely it can't be bad, no one would buy it... right?") the past several years. (Accenture/Andersen Consulting, who I have worked with on a project at a previous employer, is in the same boat -- they charged us insane amounts of money to help us set up a CRM solution, promised us the moon, and when the rubber hit the road we had to explain to our database "expert" from AC what a relational database was, and what tables, records and files were. That pretty much cured my inferiority complex over AC refusing to even look at me for jobs because I have no college degree.)
-- Old Man Kensey
. . . I don't blame him for quitting.
What?
...no trouble, I'm just here to do the CFO shuffle.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
so because you didnt get the joke, you assume it's some unfunny arbitrary string of words? please go be an idiot elsewhere.
Oracle has always been just Oracle's DB. A bunch of young programmers saw the work being done at IBM (SQL/DS, System R) and decided they wanted to join the party. They created a working implementation of the standard based on the white paper for the VAX. Intent was to get the DB to work on many of the lower-cost minicomputers of the time, IIRC, which was possible once they re-wrote it in C for version 3.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON