Never Before or Since
WMMM #063 - This week, I share my first-hand account of an unprecedented event in Oracle’s history.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter May 4, 2024 12 min read
Have you ever seen or done something noteworthy?
We receive recognition and enjoy it.
And as time passes, the memory dims.
It becomes commonplace, or someone else sets the bar even higher.
This week's story is about an accomplishment that has stood the test of time.
It shines as bright today as it did back then.
Cinco de Mayo
I forgot about the Kentucky Derby this year.
It's a favorite event of my Mom's, and as I saw the replay after the race, I quickly called her.
Every year, it takes place at the same time on the first Saturday in May.
It's easy to miss.
The horses are off just before 6 pm CT, and the race lasts less than 3 minutes.
May 5th?
That's easier for me.
It's Cinco de Mayo, for one thing.
And on Thursday, May 5, 2005, I was in California, entertaining a customer with my sales team.
That sales cycle's culmination later that month is something I remember every year.
Barber Chairs and Tequila
We spent the day at Oracle's headquarters, hosting a contingent from Amazon.
We were positioning Oracle as the technology vendor for Amazon's new initiative.
EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud, would be introduced the following year, but in May 2005, Amazon was quietly making its technology decisions.
Our account executive, Dain, had orchestrated my role for that day, a day/night doubleheader.
It's appropriate to use that baseball analogy because Dain was a former athlete, and baseball was his sport.
During the day, I was the executive sponsor, briefing the Oracle executives before they met with Amazon.
Dain was correct in believing that this activity would demonstrate to Amazon my connections with the Oracle principals.
This was important because we needed Oracle's commitment to Amazon from many areas of the company.
That night, we had planned to take the Amazon party out to dinner, and Dain wanted their key stakeholder, Rick, to leave the evening feeling like he had a personal connection with me.
This was also very important because Rick was influential within Amazon.
He was immersed in their culture of innovation and scale, leading to world-changing ideas.
Rick was breaking new ground with this EC2 project.
The day had gone well.
It was, in many respects, our typical corporate visit:
Travel the night before
Hours of preparation
Sleep deprivation
Early morning workout to get the endorphins flowing
Hungry much of the day - packed schedule
Too much coffee to keep the yawns away.
As we discussed dinner, someone (possibly one of the clients) suggested going somewhere to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.
I believe Dain already had a nice Italian place picked out with reservations in place.
We decided to take our chances and go to the Mexican restaurant with a large bar in nearby San Carlos.
We arrived over-caffeinated and undernourished.
What did we do first?
After putting our party on the waiting list for a table, we went to the bar.
The bar was festive.
It was decorated in bright colors, and everyone was enjoying themselves.
We were warmly greeted and informed of the drink specials.
They made a dozen varieties of margaritas.
They also offered a Cinco de Mayo Special Treatment to honor the day.
Tell us more.
They showed us instead.
We were taken to a special area in the bar where there were two barber chairs.
A person was sitting in each chair.
Three of the restaurant's staff were assigned to each chair.
One was responsible for finance, one for equipment, and one for customer service.
Miss Finance took your cash or swiped a credit card.
Mr. Equipment put a bib on you, seated you in the chair, and reclined the chair using the side lever.
Miss Customer Service administered the multi-alcohol, 2-ounce "tequila shot" into your mouth and attached a commemorative pin to your shirt.
Mr. Equipment brought you upright, removed your bib, and sent you on your way.
One can pretty much guess how the rest of the evening went.
I do not remember the dinner, but I kept myself together, watched my consumption carefully, and carried out the assignment from Dain.
Rick and I found a common bond in surviving that evening.
We shared a few laughs, recalling the events from time to time.
Our relationship would ultimately be one of mutual respect, personally and professionally.
I can recall few people I've met in my career who did more for their employer than Rick did for Amazon.
WaMu
Washington Mutual was the largest savings and loan in the U.S. and the sixth-largest bank.
Their claim to fame was single-family home loans.
"The Friend of the Family" was their motto for years.
CEO Kerry Killinger had initiated an aggressive M&A strategy to be "The Wal-Mart of Banking."
Acquisitions of Dime Savings Bank, PNC Mortgage, Fleet Mortgage, and Homeside Lending had fueled explosive growth but left them with disparate IT systems and data.
Consolidating these acquisitions created a nightmare in dealing with their Oracle assets.
Conflicting terms and conditions and mixed license metrics produced the perfect storm for WaMu regarding Oracle.
With their headquarters in Microsoft's backyard, we needed to find a solution to prevent Oracle from becoming vulnerable.
With Mr. Killinger's ambitious plans, WaMu should have been a fantastic opportunity for us.
It was if it wasn't for those legacy agreements and license metrics.
That changed when Oracle began to offer the "Unlimited."
See "Origin of the ULA".
Donnie and his team had sold the first one for Tony.
My team and I closed two of the next four and four of the first ten.
WaMu was our first.
Dain was also our account executive for WaMu.
The Unlimited Deployment License, later renamed ULA, was the perfect solution to WaMu's situation.
Camping Out
We closed our fiscal Q2 in November, a little behind our first-half quota.
Sharing the news of this new licensing concept, "The Unlimited," changed the possibilities for the second half.
Dain was our early adopter and he set his mind to closing Unlimiteds at WaMu and Amazon.
I would not have been surprised if told that some of the others on the team thought he was being overly optimistic.
And, if Dain had discovered this, it might have provided him with even more motivation to prove them wrong.
I loved seeing this dynamic unfold and confess to contributing to it.
"Camping Out" is a term used to represent the strategy of being physically present with the client as the deal was closing.
Be there for the final steps and signature.
The coffee shop across the street would do if being in the same room wasn't possible.
One thousand miles and two time zones away would not.
We did not invent the strategy but adopted it across the team.
There was much work to be done with WaMu and Amazon to accomplish our ambitious goals.
Therefore, I decided to camp out in Seattle.
I went for a week in January.
That turned into the following week and then the rest of January.
Seattle became my weekday location through May.
It was the longest "Camp Out" of my career.
I helped Dain with this new concept.
We had a strategy for each account, and Dain put me to work.
The customers got used to seeing me.
I also justified it to myself because Rob was working with Nordstrom and Steve with T-Mobile, both headquartered in Seattle, too.
At that time, Amazon and WaMu were not large accounts to Oracle.
Only 18 months earlier, our team had been informed that Amazon held little opportunity for Oracle's database.
Remember, we were an entire year before the beta release of EC2.
AWS, the descendant of EC2, did not exist.
With WaMu's M&A activity, one would think they'd be generating a lot of revenue for Oracle, but they were also picking up Oracle licenses, many with different license metrics that created confusion and required reconciliation and migration.
Expecting significant orders from either was optimistic.
The Wal-Mart Connection
We were successful in selling the concept to Rick.
He saw the benefits.
We needed to help him sell it internally to the other Amazon stakeholders.
Pricing an Unlimited is an art backed by mathematics.
We initially worked with a customer lens.
What value would Amazon place on a multi-year agreement for unlimited deployment of Oracle Technology?
How were they estimating their future deployment?
How could we help them with these estimates?
Once we had an idea of how they valued such an agreement and how much they could deploy, we had to remove and replace our customer lens with our Oracle lens.
We had to convince Oracle that we had done our due diligence while using a process they would understand and find acceptable.
I chose to share our methodology.
We used three estimates for year-over-year growth: low, medium, and high.
We included anomalies, like one-time projects that organic growth estimates would miss.
We arrived at a price that Oracle would accept for this license entitlement.
Once we had our approval, we could work on our negotiation strategy.
Large enterprises expected to engage in a "give and take" process once they received your proposal.
Our challenge was to arrive at a strategy that met the customer's "take" expectations without landing at a price below our approval.
Robert
Amazon was an innovative young company with plenty of wicked-smart people.
They were hiring at an unprecedented rate, so the players were constantly changing.
Rick had told Dain about an influx of people from northwest Arkansas.
That was a strange piece of information.
Rick was ambiguous with Dain by design.
Amazon had tapped into Wal-Mart for talent too often, resulting in a lawsuit.
Wal-Mart had employees with talents that Amazon valued in retail, distribution, information technology, and sourcing.
Rick needed to run our Unlimited by Robert, a native of northwest Arkansas.
Robert wanted to speak with me.
In preparation for this meeting, I learned Robert was a former sourcing professional with Wal-Mart.
Rick D, the new Amazon CIO, formerly with Walmart, had brought Robert over with him as a contractor for the time being.
This was good intelligence.
I was familiar with Wal-Mart's sourcing culture and would be ready.
I wasn't the only one gathering intelligence.
Dain learned that Robert had my name and was performing his own G2.
Robert had learned of my connection with northwest Arkansas.
He knew I had been the salesperson to win deals at the University of Arkansas and Jones Truck Lines while working for Software AG nearly twenty years ago.
It turns out that Northwest Arkansas is a tight-knit community.
Robert had even learned of my tactic of flying in our Chairman to a bidders conference.
I wasn't on LinkedIn yet.
Yikes!
This was kind of creepy.
Who are these guys?
My preparation served me well.
I chose to hit the northwest Arkansas connection head-on.
I asked Robert about the AQ Chicken House in Springdale.
That brought a chuckle and some warmth to the conversation.
You can receive your annual cholesterol intake in one sitting at AQ, but you don't care.
It's that good.
He never revealed what he knew about me, and that was okay.
We developed a solid working relationship.
I showed him the respect he deserved, and he reciprocated.
I knew he would be tough on us, but I had experience with this type of negotiation.
I also knew that he would take us down to the wire, time-wise, before approving our deal.
Sorry, Tony, this would be a cardiac close, whether we liked it or not.
Deborah
Over at WaMu, sourcing was our stakeholder.
Of course, the bank had projects and LOB stakeholders.
However, the M&A activity and the resulting mess of disparate data and systems landed with IT.
The legacy licensing had to be solved first, so IT asked Deborah in Sourcing to take point.
As with Amazon, Dain was the first in.
He met with Deborah several times and timed my introduction to her to fit perfectly with his strategy.
Deborah wasn't your typical sourcing professional, either.
She was good at her job but wanted more.
Our interactions uncovered a person who wanted to expand her network.
She saw value in what that could do for her employer and her brand.
By mid-April, Deborah wanted to complete a deal with Oracle, and she wanted her name attached to the Unlimited.
We still had work to do to confirm the source of the funds, but we felt we could get there.
This one was going to take until late May.
My gut feeling was May 31st because of Deborah's sourcing experience.
Sorry, Tony, May 31st was our deadline, not theirs.
Trust
We had to get these accounts comfortable enough to try a new licensing concept.
The concept came with a premium fee, by design, in return for the unlimited use grant.
This meant these accounts were committing to spend more money with Oracle this year than they had budgeted.
For all of this to happen, Dain had to have their trust.
He also had to establish organizational trust between the account and Oracle.
Dain accomplished this by "team selling."
He "darkened the skies" with Oracle resources for each account, mapping critical stakeholders from each party.
He figured the more touchpoints his account had with Oracle, the more likely they were to feel they were in good hands.
Dain was right.
He engineered this masterfully over a 4-5 month period.
Pressure is a Privilege
At some point in late May, Tony must have been having a conversation with Keith, our North American sales leader.
Stay with me; I'm continuing this line of thinking based purely on intuition.
And Keith asks Tony to check with me on the Q4 Forecast continuing to show two (2) Unlimiteds closing on the last day of the fiscal year by the same salesperson.
So Tony pings me, and we have a conversation.
(Tony's side only. You don't need my responses. You can guess what I said.)
Are we still good at Amazon and WaMu?
And they are both closing on Tuesday? (the 31st?)
Get outta here. No way that's happening. (He was merely testing my conviction. He believed me.)
You know, it looks like Keith needs these to make his number. (Unsure if that was true or a motivational ploy. We'll never know.)
I don't know what to tell him.
It's too late to pull them out, and I no longer have backup. (I bet that was true. We all pushed hard and stretched to make our growth numbers. We were rarely 100% successful.)
Oh boy, I've made my bed with you.
I'm counting on youz. (Tony lived in Staten Island and sometimes he'd throw in some slang.)
I'll say a prayer tonight for you and Dain.
Oh, and Jeff… I'll tell you what, you guys close both of those deals, and I’ll come to Seattle and XXXXX in the display window of Nordstrom's downtown store. (The Promise)
Pressure is a Privilege
Pressure is a gift rather than a burden. It reflects the challenges we've chosen to take on and signifies our growth, potential, and capacity to make a difference. Pressure is a privilege as it provides us an opportunity to rise to the occasion.
Dain and I ran on pure adrenaline for the last 48 hours of FY2005.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
It was Dain, me, and Rehka, our dedicated and talented pre-sales engineer.
Dain had orchestrated the roles for each of us and built redundancies into his plan to secure the paperwork from both accounts and have it in Oracle's hands before midnight.
I had a single meeting scheduled with Amazon late in the morning.
Otherwise, I was working the backroom for the team.
That meant securing last-minute approvals, navigating contract issues with our attorneys, keeping our management informed, and coordinating with our secret weapon, John, in Oracle's Finance Division.
Dain and Rehka would be in separate cars, making last-minute stops at each account to keep the line moving on these deals.
I was in our offices in Bellevue.
The accounts were located in downtown Seattle, a 20-minute drive over a body of water (Lake Washington.)
WaMu closed at 3:10 pm.
Dain was with them.
The fax went to two locations: 1) to me in our Bellevue office, where I had Contracts and Legal waiting to review and obtain countersignature, and 2) to John in his Finance offices at HQ, where he could do the same if needed.
Dain bolted for Amazon to meet up with Rehka, trusting I had everything under control.
I called Tony to tell him we had the first one.
As expected, Robert gave us some twists and turns, and so did the Amazon attorney.
We went late into the night when I got the call from Dain.
He had ink.
The fax was lighting up.
John called me because the Amazon order had reached his fax quicker than mine.
He checked all of the boxes, and we were good to go.
I called Dain to tell him we were good.
Then I called Tony.
When he answered, he said a number.
Like H17.
He told me that was the pew he was sitting in at St. Patrick's Cathedral, praying for me to call.
John
We discovered something with those first two Unlimiteds that we would use in our playbook for years.
The concept of unlimited, carrying a term of typically three years, resonated better with the finance people in our accounts if we used Oracle Financing to produce a payment plan.
Among other benefits, matching payment with deployment made a lot of sense.
John helped us understand that early on and was an asset in every large deal in the future.
We would map him with the account's finance person, and he'd move the ball forward.
Easy to work with and a consummate professional, John had the idea years earlier to make plaques for all large deals that used OFD.
It was a way to elevate the OFD brand in the early days with the large deal-doers.
John called them tombstones after the print advertisement found in the Wall Street Journal from investment banks.
When an investment bank won a big client, they created an acrylic plaque shaped like a grave marker (tombstone) for the winning sales team and ran a tombstone print ad in the WSJ announcing the new client.
John had a single tombstone made for the two Unlimited deals, closed on the same day by the same salesperson on the last day of the fiscal year.
Those in the know tell me no one has done that since.
I know for sure that no one did it before Dain did.
And Tony, we are still waiting for you to honor "The Promise."
Lessons Learned
1) Impossible is merely the degree of difficulty.
2) If you believe, you can achieve.
3) Earning trust is a valuable trait for having influence.
4) Pressure is a privilege.
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
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