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Larry Ellison |
It's been normal for most people to start thinking about retirement when they turn 70. Not Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who passed
that milestone Sunday.
"He sure doesn't appear to be ready to retire," said analyst Frank
Scavo, managing partner of IT consulting firm Strativa. "I suppose
technically he has to be drawing Social Security at this point. That has to be
something, a check coming in the mail each month made out to Larry Ellison for
$933," Scavo joked of Oracle's billionaire co-founder, who is one of the
world's richest people.
Ellison looked hale, hearty and engaged in recent public appearances, such
as the launch of Oracle's new in-memory option for its flagship database.
If he were to have a sudden health crisis preventing him from working, there
would likely be a short-term reaction from the stock market, Scavo said.
However, "Oracle has an extremely deep bench in terms of talent," he
added.
Of course, Ellison has plenty going on in his life apart from Oracle. Last
year,his
sailing team won the America's Cup and surely will defend the crown at some
point. Ellison is also working on a variety of projects on Lanai, the Hawaiian Island he bought in 2012 for reportedly more than US$500 million.
The presence of executives such as Hurd, Catz and Kurian means Ellison can
leave the company's day-to-day operations to them while focusing on Oracle's
big-picture strategy.
And indeed Ellison does. He chairs Oracle's three major weekly product
meetings and is said to spend days working on his keynote presentations,
closely watched affairs in which he typically unveils new products and lays out
Oracle's future plans.
The next of these will come next month during Oracle's massive OpenWorld
conference, where a big focus is expected to be on the vendor's move into all
aspects of cloud computing, from IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to PaaS
(platform as a service) to SaaS (software as a service) applications.
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