Oracle Corp Needs Performance Tuning: Shareholders
78 million bucks. Who wouldn’t like a salary like that? Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle Corp, already earns it.
However…
… this year, Oracle Corp asked its shareholders if Ellison’s pay could be increased by 19%. The shareholders voted against the proposed increase, 2 million and 1.6 billion for (with one 1 billion of the latter belonging to Larry). That’s 57% not in favor of it. They voted against a proposed increase last year as well, and that time 59% were against it.
This type of resolution by shareholders (known as ‘say on pay’) is, according to law, not binding. It constitutes a recommendation. A company can flout the recommendation if it wants, but that may result in a PR disaster. No public company wants that, especially for the second time in a row.
The reason shareholders were hesitant to raise Larry’s salary is that Oracle Corp’s growth has slowed down during recent years. One cause for this is that many customers no longer want to buy software for installing in their machines; they instead want to use ready-made, cloud-based solutions (cloud-based solutions offer the benefits of no hardware cost, no software maintenance cost and higher reliability).
It remains to be seen if Oracle’s new cloud offering, Oracle 12c (‘c’ for cloud) will prevent users from seeking alternatives like MariaDB or PostgreSQL. The tug-of-war is definitely not going to be a doozy!
