Podcasts about safra catz

Con una hoja de cálculo siempre a mano, Safra Catz ha impulsado más de un centenar de compras y fusiones para dar forma al gigante tecnológico que triunfa en la era de la inteligencia artificial. Nacida en Israel en 1961, Safra Catz emigró a Estados Unidos de niña junto a su familia. Se licenció en Administración de Empresas, para después conseguir un doctorado en Derecho por la Universidad de Pensilvania. De ahí dio el salto a Wall Street, donde forjó su carrera como banquera de inversión vinculada a la tecnología durante casi 14 años, hasta que en 1999 se unió a Oracle. Los redactores del periódico Amaia Ormaetxea y Antonio Santamaría analizan su legado en 'Genios de las Finanzas', un pódcast realizado por Tamara Vázquez y dirigido por Amparo Polo.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

HighlightsCustomer Boldness (00:21)In previous keynotes, Catz has encouraged customers to be more bold – and customers are responding to that. Oracle's cloud business is growing at a rate of 50% a year. “More and more of our customers are willing to not only jump in with one foot but their entire bodies because they're getting more comfortable and they're also seeing that competition is moving,” Catz says.“Transformation and transforming yourself and modernizing yourself, that is not a destination; it's a constant journey.” Businesses are recognizing that they become more adaptable to meet customer expectations when they embrace these new technologies.Multi-Cloud Agreements (04:25)Multi-cloud agreements with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS kicked off in 2024. “We have always believed that the customer should get to choose what they want to use and what environment they want to run in and how to really advance their agenda,” Catz expresses. Oracle doesn't believe in building walls or trapping customers; being open to this idea is central to Oracle's success. Because Oracle Cloud has different capabilities, the company has been able to collaborate with other providers to make their offerings work together to best meet customer needs.Healthcare Industry Offerings (08:55)Oracle has put extra energy into its industry suites, particularly for the healthcare industry. It aims to be able to handle everything from clinical trials to inventory to nursing schedules and more. At a recent health summit, Oracle launched new AI-powered capabilities for healthcare. While the company competes in several industries, Oracle acquired Cerner because “we knew that we needed to bring healthcare into the 21st century.”Larry Ellison previously shared that “we can't do it alone.” This means partnering with customers and being open to partner with other companies to apply their capabilities to ensure a quality customer experience is being delivered for patients, doctors, administrators, and others in the healthcare industry. “Do more, spend less doing it – that's our job, to give them that ability,” Catz summarizes.Revenue Goals (17:06)At its financial analyst meeting last fall, Oracle released its vision for $100 billion in revenue a few years out. Catz describes what that will look like within Oracle and how customers will contribute to the company achieving those figures. “We're telling you now, every year is going to be bigger and accelerating more,” Catz says. “The way that that curve works – it's almost unstoppable once it starts.”Cloud Data Centers (22:30)Oracle has been developing cloud data centers that are “small enough to go on a ship” as well as what Ellison has called the world's largest data centers, Evans notes. This will be important to Oracle customers in the coming years and beyond because “it gives them flexibility,” Catz explains. “We can start at any size and expand as they need it.”Ellison and New Products (24:59)2024 was a busy year for Ellison and 2025 will continue in the same manner. “This fellow does not rest,” Catz says. The Oracle team loves the new capabilities and new product lines that they've been rolling out to customers that there are no signs of slowing down.

Episode 43 | Upcoming Conference InsightsThe Big Themes:Upcoming HR and tech conferences: Oracle CloudWorld will cover AI in Fusion Applications, Oracle's autonomous database, and cloud innovations, with keynotes from Safra Catz and Larry Ellison. Workday Rising will focus on employee empowerment, new global payroll offerings, and AI in HCM. The HR Technology Conference will explore AI solutions for HR functions and system integration. SAP SuccessConnect will showcase global human experience management, AI-enabled learning, and cloud migrations.AI-driven decision-making and transformation of work practices: The conferences will spotlight how AI tools can enhance decision-making by analyzing data to predict business outcomes, while also transforming work practices. This transformation includes reducing administrative tasks and improving efficiency.Interconnectedness of systems: The conferences will also feature a strong emphasis on breaking down organizational silos and improving system integration, especially among larger ERP vendors. The aim is to enhance visibility and streamline operations across different departments.The Big Quote: “What are the partners doing to bring innovation to the forefront? How is [the] implementation of these products changing in light of AI and generative AI? Those would be the main takeaways that we're hoping to see from CloudWorld."

O Ghost Interview é um formato proprietário do Morse que recria narrativas em forma de entrevista para apresentar personalidades do mundo dos negócios, tecnologia e inovação.  O convidado: Safra Catz é a CEO da Oracle, uma gigante da tecnologia. Ela nasceu em Israel e se formou em direito na Universidade da Pensilvânia. Safra entrou para a Oracle em 1999 e, com seu talento para finanças e operações, rapidamente subiu na empresa. Em 2014, ela se tornou CEO, e desde 2019 é a única no comando. Conhecida por sua estratégia afiada, ela ajudou a Oracle a fazer grandes aquisições e a crescer nos serviços de nuvem, mantendo a empresa no topo do mundo da tecnologia. Frase: "Liderança é sobre tornar os outros melhores como resultado da sua presença e garantir que esse impacto dure na sua ausência." Leia este Ghost Interview Inscreva-se na newsletterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

O Ghost Interview é um formato proprietário do Morse que recria narrativas em forma de entrevista para apresentar personalidades do mundo dos negócios, tecnologia e inovação.  O convidado: Safra Catz é a CEO da Oracle, uma gigante da tecnologia. Ela nasceu em Israel e se formou em direito na Universidade da Pensilvânia. Safra entrou para a Oracle em 1999 e, com seu talento para finanças e operações, rapidamente subiu na empresa. Em 2014, ela se tornou CEO, e desde 2019 é a única no comando. Conhecida por sua estratégia afiada, ela ajudou a Oracle a fazer grandes aquisições e a crescer nos serviços de nuvem, mantendo a empresa no topo do mundo da tecnologia. Frase: "Liderança é sobre tornar os outros melhores como resultado da sua presença e garantir que esse impacto dure na sua ausência." Leia este Ghost Interview Inscreva-se na newsletterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is your data really safe online? Whether you like it or not, it is likely that much of it is stored by Oracle, a gigantic, U.S.-based company that has become one of the largest and most influential tech corporations in the world.Yet the company's intimate ties to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli national security state should be cause for enormous concern, our guest today argues. In episode 56 of “The Watchdog” podcast, Lowkey is joined by returning visitor, Alan MacLeod. Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. He has worked at the company since 2019. Before joining MintPress, he was an academic and a freelance journalist specializing in Latin America and in analyzing media and propaganda. Together with Lowkey, he published an investigation into Oracle's connections, titled, “Openly Pro-Israel Tech Group Now Has Control over UK's Most Sensitive National Security Data.”Together, the pair lay out Oracle's extraordinarily close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was the company's first customer in the 1970s. Indeed, the name “Oracle” comes from Project Oracle, a CIA operation that Oracle founder and former CEO Larry Ellison worked on. Since then, the relationship has only flourished, as MacLeod explained:Ever since its beginning and even before its beginning in the 1970s, as being fundamentally intertwined with the U.S. national security states, Oracle grew from a very small, fledgling company into a multibillion dollar behemoth that it is today, and it has done that through getting fat off of the huge contracts that Washington hands out.”Former CIA director Leon Panetta is a member of Oracle's board of directors, and, if media reports are to be believed, Ellison personally asked his close friend Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat at Oracle's highest table as well.The connection to Israel's prime minister is illustrative of a deep collaboration between Oracle and Israel. Indeed, the company sees aiding the Israeli government as equally important as making money. CEO Safra Catz, laid out Oracle's purpose, stating: We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren't the right company for them. Larry [Ellison] and I are publicly commitSupport the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Epicor announced their acquisition of Data Interchange, a UK-based provider of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) cloud technologies and managed services. Blackbaud kicked off their annual Developers' Conference. During this event, they highlighted their ongoing investment in Sky API, their open industry standard rest API toolset, the increase of their API endpoints, new self-service tools for technology connectors, including Microsoft Power Platform, the expansion of the Blackbaud Marketplace, and increased importance of multi-factor authentication and easy enabling of single sign-on. Oracle announced their fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and fiscal full year financial results. Total fourth quarter revenue was $11.8 billion, up 5% year-over-year. Total fourth quarter cloud revenue, for IaaS & SaaS, was $2.9 billion, up 19% year-over-year. Fiscal year 2022 total revenues were up 5% to $42.4 billion. Oracle CEO, Safra Catz, stated, “Couple a high growth rate in our cloud infrastructure business with the newly acquired Cerner applications business—and Oracle finds itself in position to deliver stellar revenue growth over the next several quarters.”Website: https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com/

Plug Power CEO Andy Marsh (PLUG) on his goal of becoming the “Amazon of hydrogen fuel.” How Oracle (ORCL) plans to dominate cloud computing, we hear from CEO Safra Catz. Is Blue Apron's (APRN) secondary share offering a sign of distress? One-time tax filers give H&R Block (HRB) a boost -- but will they be back? The Drill Down with Cory Johnson offers a daily look at the business stories behind stocks on the move. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Billionaires in the News: American Billionaires as a group surpass $1 Trillion in increased wealth during the pandemic. Elon Musk gets COVID, launches manned spacecraft, and makes a fool of himself on Twitter again. Sheldon Solow, New York real estate billionaire and “art collector,” has died. Billionaire #1: Safra Catz, 9/10 on the DKMALI (19:55) Safra Catz is the current co-CEO or Oracle. Oracle makes enterprise software and database projects, and was instrumental in building the communication infrastructure necessary for the rise of the US government surveillance apparatuses (I think I said CIA when I meant to say NSA a couple times). She has been helping steer the Oracle project for decades. She loves Trump and thinks he’s smart. She’s good pals with Sheldon Adelson. Much like Adelson, it appears she is an Israeli nationalist. You go, #girlboss! Billionaire #2: Familia Santo Domingo, 4/10 on the DKMALI (47:20) The Santo Domingo family’s fortune is rooted in the beer business, although it has become a sprawling cosmopolitan network of investments. This is a different kind of billionaire family than we’re used to. This is the sort of family that seems like it would feel more at home in the 1920s than the 2020s, because everyone is described as a “socialite” and half of them are European royalty. Downright Hapsburgian. Joe tells us a lot about how the beer industry is controlled by a duopoly, and why that’s the reason you can’t get that great microbrew you tried on vacation. Links: Solow Foundation: http://www.solowfoundation.org/hours-of-operation/ CIA Project Oracle: https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 Larry Ellison, NSA supplier: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/guy-who-provides-nsa-databases-loves-nsa-surveillance/312223/ Ellison NYT editorial: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/31/opinion/IHT-a-single-national-security-database.html Catz at Israeli ambassador’s house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yiMYts63kU Leigh Stein on #girlbossing: https://gen.medium.com/the-end-of-the-girlboss-is-nigh-4591dec34ed8 Oracle's Social Enabled Policing brochure: http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/social-enabled-policing-wp-2541916.pdf Beer duopoly: https://slate.com/business/2020/07/break-up-big-beer.html

On today's episode, we go over 7 super tips from Oracle's empowering and accomplished CEO Safra Catz. Topics include digital transformation, thinking without a box, distinguishing size and scale, and the true importance of asking questions. #1 Best Selling Author and Motivational Speaker Erik Qualman has performed in over 55 countries and reached over 50 million people. His Socialnomics work has been on 60 Minutes to the Wall Street Journal and used by the National Guard to NASA. His book Digital Leader propelled him to be voted the 2nd Most Likeable Author in the World behind Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling.  Have Erik speak at your conference: eq@equalman.com Learn more at:  https://equalman.com 

Late on a Thursday evening in February 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for his first visit with President Donald Trump. A few hours earlier, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s Boeing 737, which is so large it can seat 149 people, touched down at Reagan National Airport after a flight from Las Vegas. Adelson dined that night at the White House with Trump, Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were among Trump’s biggest benefactors, writing checks for $20 million in the campaign and pitching in an additional $5 million for the inaugural festivities. Adelson was in town to see the Japanese prime minister about a much greater sum of money. Japan, after years of acrimonious public debate, has legalized casinos. For more than a decade, Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands, have sought to build a multibillion-dollar casino resort there. He has called expanding to the country, one of the world’s last major untapped markets, the “holy grail.” Nearly every major casino company in the world is competing to secure one of a limited number of licenses to enter a market worth up to $25 billion per year. “This opportunity won’t come along again, potentially ever,” said Kahlil Philander, an academic who studies the industry. The morning after his White House dinner, Adelson attended a breakfast in Washington with Abe and a small group of American CEOs, including two others from the casino industry. Adelson and the other executives raised the casino issue with Abe, according to an attendee. Adelson had a potent ally in his quest: the new president of the United States. Following the business breakfast, Abe had a meeting with Trump before boarding Air Force One for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago. The two heads of state dined with Patriots owner Bob Kraft and golfed at Trump National Jupiter Golf Club with the South African golfer Ernie Els. During a meeting at Mar-a-Lago that weekend, Trump raised Adelson’s casino bid to Abe, according to two people briefed on the meeting. The Japanese side was surprised. “It was totally brought up out of the blue,” according to one of the people briefed on the exchange. “They were a little incredulous that he would be so brazen.” After Trump told Abe he should strongly consider Las Vegas Sands for a license, “Abe didn’t really respond, and said thank you for the information,” this person said. Trump also mentioned at least one other casino operator. Accounts differ on whether it was MGM or Wynn Resorts, then run by Trump donor and then-Republican National Committee finance chairman Steve Wynn. The Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported the president also mentioned MGM and Abe instructed an aide who was present to jot down the names of both companies. Questioned about the meeting, Abe said in remarks before the Japanese legislature in July that Trump had not passed on requests from casino companies but did not deny that the topic had come up. The president raising a top donor’s personal business interests directly with a foreign head of state would violate longstanding norms. “That should be nowhere near the agenda of senior officials,” said Brian Harding, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “U.S.-Japan relations is about the security of the Asia-Pacific, China and economic issues.” Adelson has told his shareholders to expect good news. On a recent earnings call, Adelson cited unnamed insiders as saying Sands’ efforts to win a place in the Japanese market will pay off. “The estimates by people who know, say they know, whom we believe they know, say that we're in the No. 1 pole position,” he said. After decades as a major Republican donor, Adelson is known as an ideological figure, motivated by his desire to influence U.S. policy to help Israel. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” he said last year.  On that issue — Israel — Trump has delivered. The administration has slashed funding for aid to Palestinian refugees and scrapped the Iran nuclear deal. Attending the recent opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, Adelson seemed to almost weep with joy, according to an attendee. But his reputation as an Israel advocate has obscured a through-line in his career: He has used his political access to push his financial self-interest. Not only has Trump touted Sands’ interests in Japan, but his administration also installed an executive from the casino industry in a top position in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. Adelson’s influence reverberates through this administration. Cabinet-level officials jump when he calls. One who displeased him was replaced. He has helped a friend’s company get a research deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. And Adelson has already received a windfall from Trump’s new tax law, which particularly favored companies like Las Vegas Sands. The company estimated the benefit of the law at $1.2 billion. Adelson’s influence is not absolute: His company’s casinos in Macau are vulnerable in Trump’s trade war with China, which controls the former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong. If the Chinese government chose to retaliate by targeting Macau, where Sands has several large properties, it could hurt Adelson’s bottom line. So far, there’s no evidence that has happened. The White House declined to comment on Adelson. The Japanese Embassy in Washington declined to comment. Sands spokesman Ron Reese declined to answer detailed questions but said in a statement: “The gaming industry has long sought the opportunity to enter the Japan market. Gaming companies have spent significant resources there on that effort and Las Vegas Sands is no exception.” Reese added: “If our company has any advantage it would be because of our significant Asian operating experience and our unique convention-based business model. Any suggestion we are favored for some other reason is not based on the reality of the process in Japan or the integrity of the officials involved in it.” With a fortune estimated at $35 billion, Adelson is the 21st-richest person in the world, according to Forbes. In August, when he celebrated his 85th birthday in Las Vegas, the party stretched over four days. Adelson covered guests’ expenses. A 92-year-old Tony Bennett and the Israeli winner of Eurovision performed for the festivities. He is slowing down physically; stricken by neuropathy, he uses a motorized scooter to get around and often stands up with the help of a bodyguard. He fell and broke three ribs while on a ferry from Macau to Hong Kong last November. Yet Adelson has spent the Trump era hustling to expand his gambling empire. With Trump occupying the White House, Adelson has found the greatest political ally he’s ever had. “I would put Adelson at the very top of the list of both access and influence in the Trump administration,” said Craig Holman of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I’ve been studying money in politics for 40 years.” ***** Adelson grew up poor in Boston, the son of a cabdriver with a sixth-grade education. According to his wife, Adelson was beaten up as a kid for being Jewish. A serial entrepreneur who has started or acquired more than 50 different businesses, he had already made and lost his first fortune by the late 1960s, when he was in his mid-30s. It took him until the mid-1990s to become extraordinarily rich. In 1995, he sold the pioneering computer trade show Comdex to the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for $800 million. He entered the gambling business in earnest when his Venetian casino resort opened in 1999 in Las Vegas. With its gondola rides on faux canals, it was inspired by his honeymoon to Venice with Miriam, who is 12 years younger than Adelson. It’s been said that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Adelson could be thought of as Trump’s idea of a rich person. A family friend recalls Sheldon and Miriam’s two sons, who are now in college, getting picked up from school in stretch Hummer limousines and his home being so large it was stocked with Segway transporters to get around. A Las Vegas TV station found a few years ago that, amid a drought, Adelson’s palatial home a short drive from the Vegas Strip had used nearly 8 million gallons of water in a year, enough for 55 average homes. Adelson will rattle off his precise wealth based on the fluctuation of Las Vegas Sands’ share price, said his friend the New York investor Michael Steinhardt. “He’s very sensitive to his net worth,” Steinhardt said. Trump entered the casino business several years before Adelson. In the early 1990s, both eyed Eilat in southern Israel as a potential casino site. Neither built there. Adelson “didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Trump when Trump was operating casinos. He was dismissive of Trump,” recalled one former Las Vegas Sands official. In an interview in the late ’90s, Adelson lumped Trump with Wynn: “Both of these gentlemen have very big egos,” Adelson said. “Well, the world doesn't really care about their egos.” Today, in his rare public appearances, Adelson has a grandfatherly affect. He likes to refer to himself as “Self” (“I said to myself, ‘Self …’”). He makes Borscht Belt jokes about his short stature: “A friend of mine says, ‘You’re the tallest guy in the world.’ I said, ‘How do you figure that?’ He says, ‘When you stand on your wallet.’” By the early 2000s, Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands had surpassed Trump’s casino operations. While Trump was getting bogged down in Atlantic City, Adelson’s properties thrived. When Macau opened up a local gambling monopoly, Adelson bested a crowded field that included Trump to win a license. Today, Macau accounts for more than half of Las Vegas Sands’ roughly $13 billion in annual revenue. Trump’s casinos went bankrupt, and now he is out of the industry entirely. By the mid-2000s, Trump was playing the role of business tycoon on his reality show, “The Apprentice.” Meanwhile, Adelson aggressively expanded his empire in Macau and later in Singapore. His company’s Moshe Safdie-designed Marina Bay Sands property there, with its rooftop infinity pool, featured prominently in the recent hit movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” While their business trajectories diverged, Adelson and Trump have long shared a willingness to sue critics, enemies and business associates. Multiple people said they were too afraid of lawsuits to speak on the record for this story. In 1989, after the Nevada Gaming Control Board conducted a background investigation of Adelson, it found he had already been personally involved in around 100 civil lawsuits, according to the book “License to Steal,” a history of the agency. That included matters as small as a $600 contractual dispute with a Boston hospital. The lawsuits have continued even as Adelson became so rich the amounts of money at stake hardly mattered. In one case, Adelson was unhappy with the quality of construction on one of his beachfront Malibu, California, properties and pursued a legal dispute with the contractor for more than seven years, going through a lengthy series of appeals and cases in different courts. Adelson sued a Wall Street Journal reporter for libel over a single phrase — a description of him as “foul-mouthed” — and fought the case for four years before it was settled, with the story unchanged. In a particularly bitter case in Massachusetts Superior Court in the 1990s, his sons from his first marriage accused him of cheating them out of money. Adelson prevailed. Adelson rarely speaks to the media any more, with occasional exceptions for friendly business journalists or on stage at conferences, usually interviewed by people to whom he has given a great deal of money. “He keeps a very tight inner circle,” said a casino industry executive who has known Adelson for decades. Adelson declined to comment for this story. ******* Adelson once told a reporter of entering the casino business late in life, “I loved being an outsider.” For nearly a decade he played that role in presidential politics, bankrolling the opposition to the Obama administration. As with some of his early entrepreneurial forays, he dumped money for little return, his political picks going bust. In 2008, he backed Rudy Giuliani. As America’s Mayor faded, he came on board late with the John McCain campaign. In 2012, he almost single-handedly funded Newt Gingrich’s candidacy. Gingrich spent a few weeks atop the polls before his candidacy collapsed. Adelson became a late adopter of Mitt Romney. In 2016, the Adelsons didn’t officially endorse a candidate for months. Trump used Adelson as a foil, an example of the well-heeled donors who wielded outsized influence in Washington. “Sheldon or whoever — you could say Koch. I could name them all. They’re all friends of mine, every one of them. I know all of them. They have pretty much total control over the candidate,” Trump said on Fox News in October 2015. “Nobody controls me but the American public.” In a pointed tweet that month, Trump said: “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to [Marco] Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Despite Trump’s barbs, Adelson had grown curious about the candidate and called his friend Steinhardt, who founded the Birthright program that sends young Jews on free trips to Israel. Adelson is now the program’s largest funder. “I called Kushner and I said Sheldon would like to meet your father-in-law,” Steinhardt recalled. “Kushner was excited.” Trump got on a plane to Las Vegas. “Sheldon has strong views when it comes to the Jewish people; Trump recognized that, and a marriage was formed.” Trump and his son-in-law Kushner courted Adelson privately, meeting several times in New York and Las Vegas. “Having Orthodox Jews like Jared and Ivanka next to him and so many common people in interest gave a level of comfort to Sheldon,” said Ronn Torossian, a New York public relations executive who knows both men. “Someone who lets their kid marry an Orthodox Jew and then become Orthodox is probably going to stand pretty damn close to Israel.” Miriam Adelson, a physician born and raised in what became Israel, is said to be an equal partner in Sheldon Adelson’s political decisions. He has said the interests of the Jewish state are at the center of his worldview, and his views align with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-of-center approach to Iran and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Adelson suggested in 2014 that Israel doesn’t need to be a democracy. “I think God didn’t say anything about democracy,” Adelson said. “He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state.” On a trip to the country several years ago, on the eve of his young son’s bar mitzvah, Adelson said, “Hopefully he’ll come back; his hobby is shooting. He’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. On domestic issues, Adelson is more Chamber of Commerce Republican than movement conservative or Trumpian populist. He is pro-choice and has called for work permits and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a position sharply at odds with Trump’s. While the Koch brothers, his fellow Republican megadonors, have evinced concern over trade policy and distaste for Trump, Adelson has proved flexible, putting aside any qualms about Trump’s business acumen or ideological misgivings. In May 2016, he declared in a Washington Post op-ed that he was endorsing Trump. He wrote that Trump represented “a CEO success story that exemplifies the American spirit of determination, commitment to cause and business stewardship.” The Adelsons came through with $20 million in donations to the pro-Trump super PAC, part of at least $83 million in donations to Republicans. By the time of the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape featuring Trump bragging about sexual assault, Adelson was among his staunchest supporters. “Sheldon Adelson had Donald Trump's back,” said Steve Bannon in a speech last year, speaking of the time after the scandal broke. “He was there.” In December 2016, Adelson donated $5 million to the Trump inaugural festivities. The Adelsons had better seats at Trump’s inauguration than many Cabinet secretaries. The whole family, including their two college-age sons, came to Washington for the celebration. One of his sons posted a picture on Instagram of the event with the hashtag #HuckFillary. The investment paid off in access and in financial returns. Adelson has met with Trump or visited the White House at least six times since Trump’s election victory. The two speak regularly. Adelson has also had access to others in the White House. He met privately with Vice President Mike Pence before Pence gave a speech at Adelson’s Venetian resort in Las Vegas last year. “He just calls the president all the time. Donald Trump takes Sheldon Adelson’s calls,” said Alan Dershowitz, who has done legal work for Adelson and advised Trump. Adelson’s tens of millions in donations to Trump have already been paid back many times over by the new tax law. While all corporations benefited from the lower tax rate in the new law, many incurred an extra bill in the transition because profits overseas were hit with a one-time tax. But not Sands. Adelson’s company hired lobbyists to press Trump’s Treasury Department and Congress on provisions that would help companies like Sands that paid high taxes abroad, according to public filings and tax experts. The lobbying effort appears to have worked. After Trump signed the tax overhaul into law in December, Las Vegas Sands recorded a benefit from the new law the company estimated at $1.2 billion. The Adelson family owns 55 percent of Las Vegas Sands, which is publicly traded, according to filings. The Treasury Department didn’t respond to requests for comment. Now as Trump and the Republican Party face a reckoning in the midterm elections in November, they have once again turned to Adelson. He has given at least $55 million so far. ***** In 2014, Adelson told an interviewer he was not interested in building a dynasty. “I want my legacy to be that I helped out humankind,” he said, underscoring his family’s considerable donations to medical research. But he gives no indication of sticking to a quiet life of philanthropy. In the last four years, he has used the Sands’ fleet of private jets, assiduously meeting with world leaders and seeking to build new casinos in Japan, Korea and Brazil. He is closest in Japan. Japan has been considering lifting its ban on casinos for years, in spite of majority opposition in polls from a public that is wary of the social problems that might result. A huge de facto gambling industry of the pinball-like game pachinko has long existed in the country, historically associated with organized crime and seedy parlors filled with cigarette-smoking men. Opposition to allowing casinos is so heated that a brawl broke out in the Japanese legislature this summer. But lawmakers have moved forward on legalizing casinos and crafted regulations that hew to Adelson’s wishes. “Japan is considered the next big market. Sheldon looks at it that way,” said a former Sands official. Adelson envisions building a $10 billion “integrated resort,” which in industry parlance refers to a large complex featuring a casino with hotels, entertainment venues, restaurants and shopping malls. The new Japanese law allows for just three licenses to build casinos in cities around the country, effectively granting valuable local monopolies. At least 13 companies, including giants like MGM and Genting, are vying for a license. Even though Sands is already a strong contender because of its size and its successful resort in Singapore, some observers in Japan believe Adelson’s relationship with Trump has helped move Las Vegas Sands closer to the multibillion-dollar prize. Just a week after the U.S. election, Prime Minister Abe arrived at Trump Tower, becoming the first foreign leader to meet with the president-elect. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were also there. Abe presented Trump with a gilded $3,800 golf driver. Few know the details of what the Trumps and Abe discussed at the meeting. In a break with protocol, Trump’s transition team sidelined the State Department, whose Japan experts were never briefed on what was said. “There was a great deal of frustration,” said one State Department official. “There was zero communication from anyone on Trump’s team.” In another sign of Adelson’s direct access to the incoming president and ties with Japan, he secured a coveted Trump Tower meeting a few weeks later for an old friend, the Japanese billionaire businessman Masayoshi Son. Son’s company, SoftBank, had bought Adelson’s computer trade show business in the 1990s. A few years ago, Adelson named Son as a potential partner in his casino resort plans in Japan. Son’s SoftBank, for its part, owns Sprint, which has long wanted to merge with T-Mobile but needs a green light from the Trump administration. A beaming Son emerged from the meeting in the lobby of Trump Tower with the president-elect and promised $50 billion in investments in the U.S. When Trump won the election in November 2016, the casino bill had been stalled in the Japanese Diet. One month after the Trump-Abe meeting, in an unexpected move in mid-December, Abe’s ruling coalition pushed through landmark legislation authorizing casinos, with specific regulations to be ironed out later. There was minimal debate on the controversial bill, and it passed at the very end of an extraordinary session of the legislature. “That was a surprise to a lot of stakeholders,” said one former Sands executive who still works in the industry. Some observers suspect the timing was not a coincidence. “After Trump won the election in 2016, the Abe government’s efforts to pass the casino bill shifted into high gear,” said Yoichi Torihata, a professor at Shizuoka University and opponent of the casino law. On a Las Vegas Sands earnings call a few days after Trump’s inauguration, Adelson touted that Abe had visited the company’s casino resort complex in Singapore. “He was very impressed with it,” Adelson said. Days later, Adelson attended the February breakfast with Abe in Washington, after which the prime minister went on to Mar-a-Lago, where the president raised Las Vegas Sands. A week after that, Adelson flew to Japan and met with the secretary general of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo. The casino business is one of the most regulated industries in the world, and Adelson has always sought political allies. To enter the business in 1989, he hired the former governor of Nevada to represent him before the state’s gaming commission. In 2001, according to court testimony reported in the New Yorker, Adelson intervened with then-House Majority Whip Rep. Tom DeLay, to whom he was a major donor, at the behest of a Chinese official over a proposed House resolution that was critical of the country’s human rights record. At the time, Las Vegas Sands was seeking entry into the Macau market. The resolution died, which Adelson attributed to factors other than his intervention, according to the magazine. In 2015, he purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the state’s largest newspaper, which then published a lengthy investigative series on one of Adelson’s longtime rivals, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which runs a convention center that competes with Adelson’s. (The paper said Adelson had no influence over its coverage.) In Japan, Las Vegas Sands’ efforts have accelerated in the last year. Adelson returned to the country in September 2017, visiting top officials in Osaka, a possible casino site. In a show of star power in October, Sands flew in David Beckham and the Eagles’ Joe Walsh for a press conference at the Palace Hotel Tokyo. Beckham waxed enthusiastic about his love of sea urchin and declared, "Las Vegas Sands is creating fabulous resorts all around the world, and their scale and vision are impressive.” Adelson appears emboldened. When he was in Osaka last fall, he publicly criticized a proposal under consideration to cap the total amount of floor space devoted to casinos in the resorts that have been legalized. In July, the Japanese Diet passed a bill with more details on what casinos will look like and laying out the bidding process. The absolute limit on casino floor area had been dropped from the legislation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made an unusual personnel move that could help advance pro-gambling interests. The new U.S. ambassador, an early Trump campaign supporter and Tennessee businessman named William Hagerty, hired as his senior adviser an American executive working on casino issues for the Japanese company SEGA Sammy. Joseph Schmelzeis left his role as senior adviser on global government and industry affairs for the company in February to join the U.S. Embassy. (He has not worked for Sands.) A State Department spokesperson said that embassy officials had communicated with Sands as part of “routine” meetings and advice provided to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. The spokesperson said that “Schmelzeis is not participating in any matter related to integrated resorts or Las Vegas Sands.”  Japanese opposition politicians have seized on the Adelson-Trump-Abe nexus. One, Tetsuya Shiokawa, said this year that he believes Trump has been the unseen force behind why Abe’s party has “tailor-made the [casino] bill to suit foreign investors like Adelson.” In the next stage of the process, casino companies will complete their bids with Japanese localities. ****** Adelson’s influence has spread across the Trump administration. In August 2017, the Zionist Organization of America, to which the Adelsons are major donors, launched a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. ZOA chief Mort Klein charged McMaster “clearly has animus toward Israel.” Adelson said he was convinced to support the attack on McMaster after Adelson spoke with Safra Catz, the Israeli-born CEO of Oracle, who “enlightened me quite a bit” about McMaster, according to an email Klein later released to the media. Adelson pressed Trump to appoint the hawkish John Bolton to a high position, The New York Times reported. In March, Trump fired McMaster and replaced him with Bolton. The president and other cabinet officials also clashed with McMaster on policy and style issues. For Scott Pruitt, the former EPA administrator known as an ally of industry, courting Adelson meant developing a keen interest in an unlikely topic: technology that generates clean water from air. An obscure Israeli startup called Watergen makes machines that resemble air conditioners and, with enough electricity, can pull potable water from the air. Adelson doesn’t have a stake in the company, but he is old friends with the Israeli-Georgian billionaire who owns the firm, Mikhael Mirilashvili, according to the head of Watergen’s U.S. operation, Yehuda Kaploun. Adelson first encountered the technology on a trip to Israel, Kaploun said. Dershowitz is also on the company’s board. Just weeks after being confirmed, Pruitt met with Watergen executives at Adelson’s request. Pruitt promptly mobilized dozens of EPA officials to ink a research deal under which the agency would study Watergen’s technology. EPA officials immediately began voicing concerns about the request, according to hundreds of previously unreported emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They argued that the then-EPA chief was violating regular procedures. Pruitt, according to one email, asked that staffers explore “on an expedited time frame” whether a deal could be done “without the typical contracting requirements.” Other emails described the matter as “very time sensitive” and having “high Administrator interest.” A veteran scientist at the agency warned that the “technology has been around for decades,” adding that the agency should not be “focusing on a single vendor, in this case Watergen.” Officials said that Watergen’s technology was not unique, noting there were as many as 70 different suppliers on the market with products using the same concept. Notes from a meeting said the agency “does not currently have the expertise or staff to evaluate these technologies.” Agency lawyers “seemed scared” about the arrangement, according to an internal text exchange. The EPA didn’t respond to requests for comment. Watergen got its research deal. It’s not known how much money the agency has spent on the project. The technology was shipped to a lab in Cincinnati, and Watergen said the government will produce a report on its study. Pruitt planned to unveil the deal on a trip to Israel, which was also planned with the assistance of Adelson, The Washington Post reported. But amid multiple scandals, the trip never happened. Other parts of the Trump administration have also been friendly to Watergen. Over the summer, Mirilashvili attended the U.S. Embassy in Israel’s Fourth of July party, where he was photographed grinning and sipping water next to one of the company’s machines on display. Kaploun said U.S. Ambassador David Friedman’s staff assisted the company to help highlight its technology.  A State Department spokesperson said Watergen was one of many private sponsors of the embassy party and was “subject to rigorous vetting.” The embassy is now considering leasing or buying a Watergen unit as part of a “routine procurement action,” the spokesperson said. A Mirilashvili spokesman said in a statement that Adelson and Mirilashvili “have no business ties with each other.” The spokesman added that Adelson had been briefed on the company’s technology by Watergen engineers and “Adelson has also expressed an interest in the ability of this Israeli technology to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who are affected by water pollution.” ***** Even as the casino business looks promising in Japan, China has been a potential trouble spot for Adelson. Few businesses are as vulnerable to geopolitical winds as Adelson’s. The majority of Sands’ value derives from its properties in Macau. It is the world’s gambling capital, and China’s central government controls it. “Sheldon Adelson highly values direct engagement in Beijing,” a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks says, “especially given the impact of Beijing's visa policies on the company's growing mass market operations in Macau.” At times, Sands’ aggressive efforts in China crossed legal lines. On Jan. 19, 2017, the day before Trump took office, the Justice Department announced Sands was paying a nearly $7 million fine to settle a longstanding investigation into whether it violated a U.S. anti-bribery statute in China. The case revealed that Sands paid roughly $60 million to a consultant who “advertised his political connections with [People’s Republic of China] government officials” and that some of the payments “had no discernible legitimate business purpose.” Part of the work involved an effort by Sands to acquire a professional basketball team in the country to promote its casinos. The DOJ said Sands fully cooperated in the investigation and fixed its compliance problems. A year and a half into the Trump administration, Adelson has a bigger problem than the Justice Department investigation: Trump’s trade war against Beijing has put Sands’ business in Macau at risk. Sands’ right to operate expires in a few years. Beijing could throttle the flow of money and people from the mainland to Macau. Sands and the other foreign operators in Macau “now sit on a geopolitical fault line. Their Macau concessions can therefore be on the line,” said a report from the Hong Kong business consultancy Steve Vickers & Associates. A former Sands board member, George Koo, wrote a column in the Asia Times newspaper in April warning that Beijing could undercut the Macau market by legalizing casinos in the southern island province of Hainan. “A major blow in the trade war would be for China to allow Hainan to become a gambling destination and divert visitors who would otherwise be visiting Macau,” Koo wrote. “As one of Trump’s principal supporters, it’s undoubtedly a good time for Mr. Adelson to have a private conversation with the president.” It’s not clear if Adelson has had that conversation. According to The Associated Press, Adelson was present for a discussion of China policy at the dinner he attended with Trump at the White House in February 2017. In September, Trump escalated his trade war with China. He raised tariffs on $200 billion Chinese imports. China retaliated with tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. products. Adelson has said privately that if he can be helpful in any way he would volunteer himself to do whatever is asked for either side of the equation — the U.S. or China, according to a person who has spoken to him. ****** Torossian, the public relations executive, calls Adelson “this generation’s Rothschild” for his support of Israel. In early May, the Adelsons gave $30 million to the super PAC that is seeking to keep Republican control of the House for the remainder of Trump’s term. A few days later, Trump announced he was killing the Iran nuclear deal, a target of Adelson’s and the Netanyahu government’s for years. The following day, Adelson met with the president at the White House. Five days later, Adelson was in Israel for another landmark, the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem marked a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, long eschewed by presidents of both parties. Besides dealing a major blow to Palestinian claims on part of the city, which are recognized by most of the world, it was the culmination of a more than 20-year project of the Adelsons. Sheldon and Miriam personally lobbied for the move on Capitol Hill as far back as 1995. In an audience dotted with yarmulkes and MAGA-red hats, the Adelsons were in the front now, next to Netanyahu and his wife, the Kushners and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. A beaming Miriam, wearing a dress featuring an illustration of the Jerusalem skyline, filmed the event with her phone. She wrote a first-person account of the ceremony that was co-published on the front page of the two newspapers the Adelsons own, Israel Hayom and the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “The embassy opening is a crowning moment for U.S. foreign policy and for our president, Donald Trump. Just over a year into his first term, he has re-enshrined the United States as the standard-bearer of moral clarity and courage in a world that too often feels adrift.” Adelson paid for the official delegation of Guatemala, the only other country to move its embassy, to travel to Israel. “Sheldon told me that any country that wants to move its embassy to Jerusalem, he’ll fly them in — the president and everyone — for the opening,” said Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce CEO Duvi Honig, who was in attendance. Klein, the Zionist Organization of America president, was also there. The Adelsons, he said, “were glowing with a serene happiness like I’ve never seen them. Sheldon “said to me, ‘President Trump promised he would do this and he did it.’ And he almost became emotional. ‘And look, Mort, he did it.’

Marty Mosby, Director of Bank & Equity Strategies at Vining Sparks, discusses Bank of America earnings and his outlook for financials. Tom Kottler, CEO at HealthPrize Technologies, explains how getting people to take their medication can be pharma’s hidden revenue source. Ed Keon, Chief Investment Strategist at QMA, explains why he thinks earnings growth will be the biggest story for the markets this year. Bloomberg Stocks Editor Dave Wilson's has his "Chart of the Day." Nico Grant, Bloomberg Enterprise Tech Reporter, shares why Oracle’s Safra Catz thinks the Pentagon cloud plan makes 'no sense.' We Drive to the Close with Chris Cordaro, Chief Investment Officer at RegentAtlantic.

Marty Mosby, Director of Bank & Equity Strategies at Vining Sparks, discusses Bank of America earnings and his outlook for financials. Tom Kottler, CEO at HealthPrize Technologies, explains how getting people to take their medication can be pharma's hidden revenue source. Ed Keon, Chief Investment Strategist at QMA, explains why he thinks earnings growth will be the biggest story for the markets this year. Bloomberg Stocks Editor Dave Wilson's has his "Chart of the Day." Nico Grant, Bloomberg Enterprise Tech Reporter, shares why Oracle's Safra Catz thinks the Pentagon cloud plan makes 'no sense.' We Drive to the Close with Chris Cordaro, Chief Investment Officer at RegentAtlantic. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, talks about the anemic growth of IT systems and the race for vertical integration, a day in the life of CEO and the benefit of sharing the responsibility of leadership with Safra Catz and Larry Ellison.

So news last month of Thomas Kurian, Larry Ellison and Flexcube in the cloud. The featured article this episode is one of our most popular posts, “5 Fatal Mistakes of Oracle licensing.” For all you kind people who have downloaded, please provide feedback and questions. We would love to address any questions on the show. I am currently reaching out to a bunch of very interesting people to have on the show. If you would like to be on the show please get in touch. Thomas Kurian Promoted to President Almost four months since Larry Ellison handed his CEO title to both Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, he has now promoted Thomas Kurian to President. The forty-eight year old was EVP for product development having started his Oracle career leading the Middleware strategy. He helped take Oracle to a leader in the Middleware with the suite of Middleware tools. Larry helps the critters Larry is clearly a busy man and is putting some of his substantial wealth to helping establish a Wildlife breeding and animal rehab centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. Read more at NBC The Bay Area News Oracle Cloud runs a new UK Bank Hampden & Co. will be running Oracle’s core banking solution Flexcube on Oracle cloud. Oracle will run the application as a managed service on Oracle Sparc T5 out of the UK Oracle data center in Linlithgow, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Hampden Group run a diversified set of services in the insurance and finance sectors. They announced last year that they would be taking a significant stake in a new bank for private clients called Hampden & Co plc. oracle licensing rules – 5 Fatal Mistakes “Five Fatal Oracle License Mistakes”, alright the title is a bit dramatic, but the following 5 mistakes crop up on such a regular basis that we at Madora believe they are worth reiterating. For those experienced with Oracle, they will know the following as classic gotchas and will keep an eye out. IT professionals and Procurement Officers new to the ways of Oracle may get caught out – so be warned. Let’s walk through some of the five common areas that often have disastrous consequences. The Five Fatal Mistakes are: 1. Virtualising without fully understanding the implications. The issue we see time after time is misunderstanding Oracle licensing on VMware. So why is this? It’s to do with server partitioning. Server partitioning can be very confusing; it is designed to limit the amount of processor resource available to a program; it is nothing to do with the Oracle Database Partitioning extra cost option – that is a means of partitioning data tables. Oracle simplifies server partitioning into two groups; the methods that it refuses to recognise as valid, known as “Soft Partitioning”; and those it accepts really do subdivide servers, known as “Hard Partitioning”. Probably the most popular server partitioning method is VMware, a very flexible form of partitioning and a great means of managing a datacentre. Guess what? It is soft partitioning for Oracle; this means that it is incredibly easy to fall foul of Oracle’s licensing rules. How your VCenter is set up, the clusters, the VMs, the storage architecture all have an impact on licensing. VMware publish guidelines on how to license Oracle but Oracle don’t support their view; great fun when it is your turn for Oracle’s regular license audit! Oracle’s approach to VMware has changed even further since the release of VMware Version 5.1 with its more advanced DRS/VMotion capabilities and its shared storage functionality. Seek independent help to review your architecture and any planned changes; don’t assume anything!! 2. Disaster Recovery scenarios not licensed correctly This can be a complex area with technologies changing all the time. We highly recommend you speak to Madora Consulting if you have any doubts as to whether you are correctly licensed for DR architectures. In general we advise that you assume you need to be licensed fully and then check to see if your scenario falls under failover and whether the 10 day rule applies. In terms of licensing be aware that you cannot mix metrics. In other words if processors are used for the primary site then the backup site also needs to be licensed by processor. A common mistake is believing that Named User Plus licenses can be used for the backup site – in the hope of saving money. You are better off ring fencing the DR servers contractually and negotiating a reduced cost for this license pool. Also make sure that the options and management packs are licensed, as these are often forgotten. In short, scenarios where the Primary and Secondary nodes share a SAN, with the secondary node acting as a failover, only the Primary needs to be licensed. This is valid as long as the failover to the secondary lasts less than 10 days per year, which includes any testing. Any standby or mirroring environments must be fully licensed. See the Oracle paper on DR pricing http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070587.pdf 3. Non production environments not licensed. With Oracle you do need a valid license for development environments, test environments and any pre-production environments. This whole article assumes standard terms and conditions but you may have negotiated non standard options, so do check. Test and development must be correctly licensed. Use of OTN licenses does not necessarily mean you are licensed correctly for Development environments. (Note -the environment used by end users for business or other operations is called a production environment.) Oracle Technology Network licenses for development Some developers are aware of the Oracle Technology network where licenses can be downloaded. OTN does offer a restricted license grant but this too is often misunderstood. The OTN license is really for the use of a single developer whom wishes to try out a piece of software. The license is only allowed for one user and one server. We have seen cases of whole development teams assuming that the OTN licenses give them the right to develop an application as they have not moved into production but this is not the case. See below an extract from the OTN license document: “Customers also may download Oracle technology products from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) at http://otn.oracle.com/software/. In order to download an Oracle product from OTN, customers must signify their agreement to the terms of the OTN Development License. This limited license gives the user the right to develop, but not to deploy, applications using the licensed products. It also limits the use of the downloaded product to one person, and limits installation of the product to one server. Customers may not use products licensed under the OTN Development License in connection with any classroom activity, internal data processing operations, or any other commercial or production use purposes..” If you do use the OTN licenses and work within the restriction i.e. one user, one server as soon as the application developed moves into production the correct licenses must be purchased. We know from talking to Oracle that they do monitor downloads, particularly for the more specialised products and will look for inconsistencies, i.e. a known live environment with 20 downloads could imply that developers are using the software when they should be licensed. 4. Database options typically for the Enterprise Manager Packs are often installed by default but not purchased. This one still crops up either because the DBAs have installed the options as this is the default on installations or because the DBAs assume that the options have been purchased. The reality is that most DBAs really do need the testing, tuning and diagnostic packs. They are almost a prerequisite to managing Oracle estates. Most of us would almost regard them as part of the core database. Unfortunately they are still chargeable options so must be purchased. Some confusion still exists as the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Database Control and Grid control are provided free of charge. But they need the chargeable packs to really add value and these need licenses to cover the applications that are being monitored. See an extract from Chapter 10 of the Oracle® Enterprise Manager Licensing Information (found on the home page of the OEM documentation) specifically states; “The base installation of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c includes several features free of charge with the purchase of any Oracle software license or Support contract”. It is not unusual for small to mid-sized groups to legally install a Cloud Control free of charge on a spare server in their area. As indicated, a basic install, with no frills, is included with any supported license. A very common pitfall for organisations facing difficulties with their Oracle license management comes from not having the right options granted and management packs installed for their needs. When the Oracle Enterprise Database Edition server is installed, by default all the enterprise options are installed too and it is important to know what you are actually using and whether you need it. There are two aspects to this, firstly you need to know what databases are installed and what editions they are i.e. standard or enterprise. Secondly, you need to know whether any management packs have been “accepted” or options “granted”, to use Oracle’s terminology. Interpreting this incorrectly can significantly affect licensing costs from anywhere between US$163,000 and US$800,000 per processor, because options and management packs require additional licensing and should not be present if not needed as this rapidly adds to the total cost. 5. License Minimums not understood, so Named User Plus licenses not counted correctly. A number of products have a minimum number of licenses that must be purchased, fairly standard software practice in the industry. However, there is added complexity with Oracle with some metrics such as Named User Plus. The mistake many people make is assuming that the number of Named User Plus licenses relates directly to the total number of the users of the system in use, unfortunately that is not always the case. For the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition there is a minimum of 25 Named User Plus per licensable processor. So even with NUPS you still need to understand two things; what a licensable processor is and how many do you have. This presents extra work and understanding on your part. From a compliance point of view you must own the larger of either the total number of users or the license minimums. The key points here are that a user is counted (at source) regardless of whether they actively use the Oracle programs and that non human devices are also counted. If you are using transactional processing monitoring software or using application/web servers then be sure to measure the users at the front end. For example, 1,000 users accessing a web application that connects to a back end database via an application server needs to count 1,000 users, even if the user is an anonymous system user between the application server and database. User minimums still need to be counted as well, so check the relevant user minimums table for the product in question. For Database Enterprise Edition you need the larger of either – processor count x 25 NUPS or User/devices. A licensed Named User Plus may access the Oracle technology on any instance (Production, Test, Development) or server throughout the organisation as long as the user minimums are met. Named User Plus licenses are decreasing in usage as Processor license metrics are increasingly easier to manage and make more sense when it is difficult to measure users.Example 1 Let’s say you have a non production environment used for staging and patch testing before roll out to the live financials systems, the application runs on Oracle Enterprise Edition. The non production environment is used by x 1 DBA, x 1 Financials Functional Consultant and x 1 Financials Developer. The common mistake is to assume that only x 3 Named User Licenses are required. Assuming you have no special contract terms then the license minimums kick in. So firstly we need to know the server(s) that the non production runs on. Let’s say you have two servers each with 8 cores (ask your infrastructure Manager to tell you the total number of cores per server). If you ask for the number of processors you may get the wrong answer, i.e one processor can have 8 cores, so you may use the processor count, which would be incorrect. It is licensable processors which we need and that is dependent on the core count. Think of cores as Olympic rowers sharing the same boat, it’s the number of rowers that impacts speed. We have a total of 16 cores and to determine the total number of licensable processors multiply the core count by the core multiplier. See our downloadable guide to useful oracle links to get the URL for the table. The core multiplier is dependent on the Chip manufacturer. If your Chip manufacture is Intel then simply multiply the core count by 0.5. So 16 x 0.5 = 8 Licensable Processors. Now each processor needs a minimum of 25 Named User Plus licenses. So we are looking at 25 x 8 = 200 Named User Plus Licenses. As this is the greater of the number of users/devices then this is the number required to be correctly licensed. Yes indeed! 200 Named Users required not 3! This is the gift that just keeps giving for Oracle. Don’t get caught out.Example 2 Lets look at the production environment for the live Financials systems. The application runs on Oracle Enterprise Edition on 2 servers with a total 16 cores. The environment is used by x 1 DBA, x 1 Financials Functional Consultant and x 1 Financials Developer with a total of 300 employees for Payroll. You know from the previous example that the minimums are 200 Named Users, but this is lower than the 300 employees (includes the DBA and 2 Developers.) Oracle therefore, no surprise here, requires 300 Named User licenses. Now although a Named User gives the right to access any server, the user minimums for the entire Oracle estate still apply. So for the production and non production environments, 300+200 = 500 named Users would be required. See a more detailed article on User Minimums The above are the most common costly mistakes Madora come across. Thank you for downloading. Please find more about us online at Madora.co.uk. Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line via email kay.williams@madora.co.uk

Thank you for downloading. Please find us online at Madora.co.uk. Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line via email kay.williams@madora.co.uk Is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? With recent announcements in Oracle OpenWorld 2014, is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? Oracle’s core business has, like many of the larger enterprise software companies been focused on selling software designed to run on premise and charging a flat fee for the licenses and typically an annual support and maintenance fee. Over the last fifteen years we have seen a number of application providers providing access to their application via subscription models that do not require the purchase of any infrastructure – database, application servers, operating systems, networking or and hardware servers. Although Larry Ellison has in the past been quick to poo poo cloud computing he has clearly woken up to the industry shift. “We have a new, much-upgraded cloud platform,” Ellison said to his key note speech on the 28th September. “We are just getting started. We launched our real platform this month.” Previously the only options for customers to run Oracle in the cloud on a true subscription basis was via Amazon or Azure. Oracle will “have the same pricing as Amazon or any other infrastructure provider,” Chairman Larry Ellison said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Oracle has seemed to be behind in many ways with regards to providing utility or SaaS type pricing. Sure Oracle would argue that Fusion Apps have been available for a while and the cloud application portfolio is increasing all the time. However most customers still run ‘on the premise applications’ which are fundamentally different than the Fusion Apps which were written from scratch for the cloud. It is these traditional ERP/CRM/SCM legacy applications that present a number of problems for customers: Licensing metrics are often not clear. It does not allow for the growth or decline of the business. It does not allow for spikes or seasonal peaks. It does not lend itself for innovation, testing of new concepts. It does not allow a trial to review business benefits or ROI. So what about customers that have written their own apps running on Oracle or use vendor apps based on Oracle? Many want to pay for Oracle technology licences as a subscriptions whether on premise on their own kit or on the cloud.Clearly Oracle is moving this way with enhancements to its PaaS services. See https://cloud.oracle.com/database The fully ‘Oracle managed’ Oracle database is yet to make an appearance but pricing is available for a number of options. For example the client managed option for High Performance Enterprise Edition is $4,000 / Month per OCPU. This sounds high but it does include a large number of management, testing and security database options. The pricing is also available by the hour so it is absolutely possible to use this for testing, development or backup. It’s per OCPU – not sure what that really means. When I get a better idea I will let you know. Where I see the real opportunity is for the duel running of new systems. Previously the only real option for customers to run new systems in parallel for a period before switch over was to buy 1 year term licenses in order to remain compliant. Cloud Alternatives The current alternatives to Oracle’s cloud services are Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ or Microsoft’s Azure. Amazon Web Services and Oracle Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to bring your own licences or use Oracle included licences. Costs start from 0.04 USD per hour for the on-demand licence included option which means that running an oracle application really is more affordable than ever. Bring you own licence starts at 0.025 USD. There does appear to be one downside of the licence included option and that is the database is Standard Edition 1. This could mean that applications that use Enterprise option will not be able to take advantage of this. While this may not provide the licence subscription desirable for most enterprise applications, for developers this could be a more effective way to run proof of concepts. What about cannibalisation of revenues? One of the main criticisms of Oracle not being so quick to adopt subscription based licence models for Database and Middleware was the concerns about cannibalisation of its existing revenue streams. Last month in the Oracle earnings call Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter profit and sales that were below analysts’ projections. Oracle also forecast Q2 revenues and profits below estimates. Oracle is investing in its cloud division and there is a big drive within Oracle to push managed cloud services with big incentives for its sales teams. On the same call Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO said,”As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive”. See full earnings transcript on Seeking Alpha.So in summary , I welcome the announcements in OpenWorld 2014. It is a good start and it should provide some alternative flexible options for customers who want a subscription based pricing. This will present some organisational challenges especially around its sales division. Sure customers are going to continue to run software on premise but do Oracle really need all those sales people? So what do you think? Does Oracle or even Amazon present a viable alternative now? Will you use it?