Jeff Bezos is breathing down the neck of Oracle’s overpaid bosses. The Amazon founder’s bold bets helped the e-commerce giant create a huge cloud business as part of his $906 billion behemoth. His annual letter talks about winning a bigger share of the commercial-database market. It’s a warning for Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and his two high-priced chief executives, who will need to better justify their pay if they’re to see Bezos off.
Business success isn’t just about efficiency, Bezos writes. It also takes some wandering, or experimentation. That’s how his team built Amazon Web Services into a cloud-computing giant on track to have revenue of well over $30 billion this year, if it maintains its 40 percent-plus growth rate.
The secret, according to Bezos, is listening to customers. Companies, he says, have told Amazon they were unhappy with commercial-database vendors whose “offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms.” That sounds like a swipe at Oracle, which for years dominated the corporate database market but has been slow to respond to the cloud challenge.
Having a large installed software base has been great for the $184 billion Oracle. Costs are minimal for each new customer, and it can be disruptive for clients to switch to a rival product or service. That kind of sticky repeat revenue can make companies complacent.
Ellison took home nearly $109 million in total compensation last year. His two chief executives, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, made do with a touch over $108 million. Each of them received almost two-thirds more than the next highest-paid CEO among the 100 largest U.S. companies, Walt Disney’s Robert Iger, as well as getting by far the biggest pay increases from the year before, according to a new report from Equilar.