Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

The new efficiency/normal according to Steve Ballmer

I was reading Steve Ballmer's latest email entitled "The New Efficiency" (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2009/09-29NewEfficiency.mspx) in which he basically says the new normal in business is that "people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution."  This is a simple yet powerful premise to do more with less.  At Simba, we have always tried to help our customers do more with less.  Simba started out helping ISVs deliver custom ODBC and JDBC drivers to their customers to increase value.  With our ODBC and JDBC SDKs, our ISV customers were able to quickly and efficiently build open standards based data connectivity for their databases which then gave their customers tremendous advantage in they could now use a wide variety of applications with these databases.  Then, Simba broadened what we did by also adding an OLAP SDK that supports ODBO and XMLA.  Today, Simba is going a step further.  We are now adding value directly for enterprise customers.  Our new MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP lets any user of Oracle OLAP connect to their data directly from Microsoft Excel.  The user gets to leverage all the power of Excel and Oracle OLAP without having to either use an Excel spreadsheet add-in which requires learning new software or a separate mid-tier server which can be quite expensive and take time to install and configure.

Timeline on Oracle's acquisition of Sun

I was reading an interesting little timeline on eWeek about how Oracle ended up acquiring Sun Microsystems.  You can read it here http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Anatomy-of-a-MultibillionDollar-IT-Acquisition-894207/?kc=EWKNLDAT05142009STR1.  Interesting timeline and also interesting how IBM and HP were also both involved.  In my experience in business, many deals don't happen because in uncertain times, people are afraid of making decisions for fear of being wrong.  What is interesting in the above timeline is that both IBM and HP could have acquired Sun, but ultimately, it was Oracle that made the bold decision to do so.

This reminds me of when my partners and I decided to acquire Simba in 2000.  Initially, I was against the deal.  One of my partners, Dale Reimer, was a strong supporter of doing the deal.  My hesitation was ultimately a good thing because it allowed Dale to negotiate a lower price.  However, it was Dale's boldness that got us to pull the trigger and acquire Simba.  Of course, the next challenge was taking what we had bought and making it even more successful.  I have found that when there are good deals to be had, human nature seems to always make us suspect as to "is this deal too good to be true?"  That is the point where the smart people are able to determine what to do.  Oracle seems to be able to pull the trigger at such times (so far so good) and my old partner Dale was also able to pull the trigger.  I need to make sure I learn from both Oracle and Dale Reimer.