Larry Ellison at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote in San Francisco on 30 September 2014, twelve days after he gave up the chief executive title. Credit: Oracle PR / Hartmann Studios / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons Larry Ellison has been absent from Oracle’s earnings calls this year and is not on the billing for next month’s user conference, a year after the company promoted Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to co-chief executives. Magouyrk built the cloud business whose European proposition is a sovereign region operated by EU legal entities, a product Ellison never had to sell. Larry Ellison has been missing from Oracle’s earnings calls this year, Bloomberg reported, and the company is billing next month’s user conference keynotes without him.
He has been Oracle’s public face since he founded it, and stayed there after giving up the chief executive title in 2014. One of his few previous absences was for a yacht race. The billing changed because the company did. Oracle promoted Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to co-chief executives last September, with Safra Catz moving to executive vice chair.
Ellison is 82. He is still chairman and chief technology officer and owns about 40% of the stock, so the influence has not moved anywhere. What has moved is the explaining, and Oracle has more to explain than it did. It is spending $2.8B on job cuts while borrowing to build data centres, and its headcount has fallen 13% in a year.
In Europe the handover matters more than the change of titles suggests. Magouyrk joined Oracle in 2014, the year Ellison gave up the chief executive job, after six years at Amazon and AWS. He built Oracle Cloud Infrastructure out to more than 100 public regions. His Oracle biography lists sovereign cloud among his responsibilities, for customers with location or sovereignty restrictions.
That product exists. Oracle has run an EU Sovereign Cloud since June 2023, with regions in Frankfurt and Madrid owned by separate EU legal entities and supported only by staff based in the EU. Equinix hosts the Frankfurt region and Digital Realty hosts Madrid. Both are kept apart from Oracle’s commercial cloud down to the networking, the control planes and the identity services.
Amazon opened its own European sovereign cloud in Brandenburg this January, two and a half years later, and its new AI assistant does not appear on the published service list. Ellison never had to sell any of that. His Oracle sold databases and applications, and he won arguments about them in public. The company on stage in Las Vegas next month sells capacity, much of it to one customer, financed by borrowing that has taken Oracle to one notch above junk.
That business belongs to the successors.
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