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?"

Comments

Re:CFO Leaving is bad news.

[Locke2005]

Or they want to leave before they get indicted. If a CFO leaves just before a quarterly report, it generally means he is resigning to avoid committing perjury by signing a report he knows to be false. I beleive this report was intentionally delayed also, which is further evidence that there might be statements in the report that nobody wants to sign their name to.

Life at Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Life at Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

I left Oracle as a sysadmin after only 2 months on the job in their flagship datacenter. The entire organization from the top down is ruled by fear. Fear of the guy above you. I was in constant concern for my job the entire time, not because I couldn't perform, but afraid that I would do something politically wrong. And I was just a sysadmin!

It sucked, bigtime. Though they did have a crazy amount of servers and a whole buttload of technology.

Everything was to be feared, however.

Old Microsoft Money Wizard

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Maffei - that's Microsoft's old money wizard... if he's jumping ship that's not a good sign.

Re:Old Microsoft Money Wizard

[toddbu]

He was also the last well-respected Microsoft CFO. While Maffei was in charge, Microsoft could literally do nothing wrong financially. When the earnings were announced, he'd say something like "don't expect good results next quarter" and the stock would skyrocket. When Connors replaced him, it was almost the exact opposite. Connors would say virtually the same thing, and the stock would tank. Microsoft has definitely suffered from the leadership vacuum that Maffei's departure left.

Guilt

[lucm]

One just can't buy an Oracle database license. Accountants, lawyers and engineers must be involved to find out what insane amounts you will have to feed the monster every year. Basically, it's cheaper to have a SQL Server 4-processor license than hiring the experts required to calculate your Oracle yearly premium for the same hardware.

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.

Re:Guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you can only hold out so long with that argument. M$ will hit that ball many times and at some point take it out of the park. Yeah Yeah I'm a big Fitzmas fan

Re:Guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing Oracle and SQL Server is like comparing a Lambhorghini to a Bicycle. Or a Miss Universe to a bag lady. Its just not done by people in the know. That said the only thing that comes close nowadays is Postgres.

Re:Guilt

[duffbeer703]

Have you ever used Oracle? Its a bigger steaming pile of shit than Lotus Notes, and that says alot.

Oracle can do amazing things. But with the money you need to spend on Oracle consultants, you could custom-write whatever you are buying from Oracle.

Re:One Word:

[Scaba]

By strange coincidence, that episode aired exactly nine years ago today.

Re:CFO Leaving is bad news.

[queenb**ch]

High turn over in upper management means:

1) Legal fears - criminal or civil

2) Another C-level guy that no one can stand

3) Company is tanking

My personal vote is for #2 and I suspect his initials are L.E.

2 cents,

Queen B

As an Oracle employee,

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

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.

Re:CFO Leaving is bad news.

[NeutronCowboy]

Or 4) they are in legal trouble. Like just happened in my company. Sigh. Enrons will always be around.

Byzantine licensing

[obtuse]

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