Larry Ellison, the charismatic CEO and founder of the company, believed that Oracle could lead the IT industry to a phase of consolidation and integration to deliver higher value at a much lower cost to customers. The cost of integration and maintenance due to the complexity of combining software and hardware from different vendors, was significant. Companies had to spend huge sums of money on system integration simply to enable applications to exchange data. While Oracle had come up with a solution to meet a broad range of its customers’ needs, its challenge now was: How could it drive a change by selling value for enterprise architecture? How could it operationalize a radical strategic change that would continue to rely heavily on its partners while at the same time changing their business model? How could it make such a strategic change in an organization the size of Oracle? Michel Clement, vice president of Oracle Central Europe, had a track record of delivering on stretch targets but this latest challenge promised to be particularly demanding. He had to figure out how to implement the strategy in Central Europe.
