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Case Study

Oracle: An evolution of the IT paradigm

By Carlos Cordon, Ralf W. Seifert, Fang Liu and Philippe Margery

11 pages

December 2012

Reference: IMD-6-0336

Larry Ellison, the charismatic CEO and founder of the company, believed that Oracle could lead the IT industry to a phase of consolidation and integration to deliver higher value at a much lower cost to customers. The cost of integration and maintenance due to the complexity of combining software and hardware from different vendors, was significant. Companies had to spend huge sums of money on system integration simply to enable applications to exchange data. While Oracle had come up with a solution to meet a broad range of its customers’ needs, its challenge now was: How could it drive a change by selling value for enterprise architecture? How could it operationalize a radical strategic change that would continue to rely heavily on its partners while at the same time changing their business model? How could it make such a strategic change in an organization the size of Oracle? Michel Clement, vice president of Oracle Central Europe, had a track record of delivering on stretch targets but this latest challenge promised to be particularly demanding. He had to figure out how to implement the strategy in Central Europe.

Learning Objective

How to devise an implementation strategy and keep partners engaged throughout a transformational industry shift.

Keywords

Partnering Strategy, Information Technology, Production Management, Operations Management, Operations

Settings

Europe
2008-2011

Available Languages

English

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