Not a great day for Oracle: Top cloud exec jumps ship, analyst recommends cutting shares Google has poached another of Oracle’s top cloud execs with company veteran Amit Zavery joining his former boss Thomas Kurian at the ad-search behemoth - the latest blow to the Oracle's services ambitions. Zavery was executive veep for Oracle's cloud platform and was the highest-ranking officer in the firm's cloud division …
Actually that would be quite a good idea. I knew an accountant who went to work for Safeway when it was known to be in trouble so he could put on his CV that he had extensive knowledge of dealing with all kinds of accounting problems.
Just being able to say "we tried that and it didn't work" can justify someone's salary.
Just being able to say "we tried that and it didn't work" can justify someone's salary.
In the case of an Oracle exec, it's more like, "we tried that and it worked like a charm right up until the marks, er, customers realised how much we were ripping them off. So just do it for six months less than that."
Just being able to say "we tried that and it didn't work" can justify someone's salary. We tried that on other company's budget, that is. And yes, if done wisely, hiring someone with more negative experience may be a better business development than hiring someone with one great success. Because one great success can almost never be conclusively attributed to skill ( my guess is that the name-making successes are down to sheer luck with p > 0.99), whereas showing good analytical aptitude towards failures (which, it is important to remember, are quite often the competitor's failures during a job application interview, and quite usually the failures are not attributable to a single person) would be a very good sign to me.
I saw an article recently on this-- specifically, it seeks to answer whether "rockstar CEOs" with a string of corroborated successes to their names exist, and if the industry dogma that an MBA is necessary to a CEO's effectiveness holds. TL;DR The answer seems to be, "um, no" to both questions...
You'd be surprised how many SaaS businesses hire ex-SAP, Oracle and I people. For all the faults of Oracle platforms and technology, the people typically know how to build a sales engine and I imagine that's what he's been hired to do (for a few years a complaint levelled at Google was they didn't know how to sell to Enterprise). It'll be interesting to see how they adapt to the culture as I imagine it's very different between Oracle and Google, but if they are putting $$$ on the board then culture is irrelevant.
"Why would anyone poach an exec from Oracle?"
At exec level, you're not poaching the technical knowledge of the company, you're poaching the customer relationships.
Having someone who can walk into an existing customer with a good understanding of who to have dinner and golf with to get decisions made is important in the corporate world and often glosses over the technical capabilities of a solution.
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