Monday 12 January 2015

The rise of Thomas Kurian as Oracle's top exec

Kurian was born in the southern Indian state of Kerala and was raised in Bangalore. He came to the United States in 1986, and went to Princeton for graduate school in electrical engineering.
He joined Oracle in 1996 after a brief stint as an associate at McKinsey & Co, the management consultancy firm.

From there, Kurian quickly rose to become one of Ellison's closest confidants. By the mid 2000s, Oracle was making a big push to build middleware into its next billion-dollar business, and Ellison picked Kurian to lead that effort.By fiscal 2006, the business achieved its goal and Kurian established himself as an executive to watch within Oracle. 

Oracle had made several multibillion-dollar acquisitions over the same period, including human resource software maker PeopleSoft and customer management applications maker Siebel, and plugged those assets under its applications business. In 2007, Ellison put Kurian in charge of integrating these different products.

Outside technology circles and Oracle little is known about Kurian. In interviews, current and former Oracle executives provided insights into how the India-born engineer rose up the ranks and what may have kept him back from getting the corner office already.They painted a picture of a smart technologist who understands Oracle's products inside out, works long hours, executes Ellison's vision and has such little patience for small talk that some people think he is uncomfortable in one-on-one conversations.

His biggest achievement so far is seen as building Oracle's middleware business, the software plumbing that connects different parts of a computer network — such as the link between an operating system and applications used by businesses - into a substantial enterprise.


by :- Akshay Chaudhary 

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