Quotes from Safra A. Catz

It's critical to simplify and run the business in such a way that resources are released to invest in your main business.

In the cloud, customers don't want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.

I come from Wall Street, and you'll never see me do a PowerPoint because I'm all about Excel spreadsheets. If it's not in the numbers, I don't care how strategic it is; it doesn't play out.

Microsoft does platform, not really infrastructure, and they do a little bit of Saas.

The Indian market is potentially the largest market in the world with the leadership at both central and state level focused on leapfrogging into the future.

It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.

Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.

My dream job was to work in an ice cream shop. Two weeks and five pounds later, I realized it wasn't for me. For many years, I had planned to be a corporate lawyer. As luck would have it, other than a summer internship, I didn't end up doing that either.

SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases.

Common sense will always prevail. America will advance the agenda for the greatest minds.

As much as people say they love change, they love it when you change - not when you want them to change. Even when it comes to processes they don't like, they're afraid of change.

The demographic of young people... in each hand is a phone, more powerful than a computer. It's a doorway to the digital nation, to education.

The fact is that our business is fundamentally really strong. We have a platform and a depth that no one in the tech industry has. This means we have competitors at every layer.

What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.

Oracle has grown and advanced because we've been consistently willing to cannibalize ourselves.

Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.

My greatest inspiration is my mother, the bravest person I ever knew. She overcame incredible odds, worked while raising two kids, and made it all look incredibly simple. Even in her final days succumbing to cancer, she fought like a champion.

It is not a coincidence that Fusion middleware and applications have the same name. We knew what we needed it to be.

My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.

A core focus of our effort is based on the recognition that our customers have varying needs, and one of their most important needs is to have choice.

Managers used to say, 'I have a gut feeling.' Do you know what a gut feeling is for a professional manager? It's a pattern that they recognize. But if your system can recognize that pattern, if it's not just a couple of managers who know that pattern, then the system's gut feeling can tell you which way to go. That's really liberating.

What happened in the past can help you know what's going to happen in the future. That insight brings a next level of intelligence not just to sales and marketing but to ERP, where you can save more money in procurement or figure out whether the people you recruit are going to be successful in your organization.

Hardware ultimately is a scale game, and it's a differentiation game. If you are literally selling products that are completely undifferentiated, like x86 servers, why would anybody pay you for that?

Oracle is my second job ever that did not involve waitressing. But I still have my waitress apron just in case this does not work out. It's just that I fell in love with software when I was programming in college. When I was an investment banker, there were mostly mainframe companies and very few software ones.