I went to the University of Michigan, studied engineering, and I really, really enjoyed going to school. So it is my intention to get a PhD and stay in academia. But I happen to graduate in the winter as opposed to the spring. So I got out a bit early, and as a result I took the opportunity to go work for Texas Instruments. What I thought would be 68 months prior to starting my PhD. And I found that I had a real knack for leadership in business. And, I got really interesting assignment that very early on I was just out of college. I got the opportunity to take a big leadership role. And so I made the decision that I'm going to get an MBA while I'm working. And so I kind of started this track of doing leadership stuff, and one job led to another and moved out of doing military intelligence technology for Texas Instruments into IT at Esteem Microelectronics, which led me to Tom Motorola for 10 years. And then, in the very late nineties, Siebel Systems was on the cover of Fortune is the fastest growing company, United States. And they found that their internal infrastructure, their internal processes, were keeping pace with the scale of the company. So they looked for somebody from a big time company. And I was CIO over at Motorola Semiconductor, where we had one The Malcolm Baldridge Award, the first recipient of that, and also had invented Six Sigma. And so they convinced me to move to California and I was CIO at Siebel Systems for 6.5 years went from 300 million to a few billion dollars revenue. Tom sold the company to his old boss, Larry Ellison, and suggested that Larry retained me to be CIO at Oracle ended that for another 13.5. So on my 20th anniversary a year ago this month, I moved on to my next chapter.

I joined Oracle after against its San Pearson Siebel when we are acquired by Oracle. And so my role as CIO was to the global technology platform that runs the company and when I joined in 2006 were about 45,000 - 50,000 employees, $10 billion in revenue. When I left, we were about $40 billion in revenue and 140,000 employees. During that time, we had acquired a 440 companies that my team was responsible from a technology standpoint of assimilating into Oracle, so basically my job responsibility was the global technology platform from beginning with devices that people use, whether it be mobile devices, laptops and so forth into how they then connect to Oracle no matter where in the world there at, up through then applications and various things they use to accomplish the business, including doing things like what around, you know, collaboration systems and so forth things along that line. But in addition IT Executive CIO's all do those kinds of things, but at Oracle, I took on another three responsibilities the first one was to be the biggest influencer of our products at Oracle we were the largest, the broadest consumer of Oracle technology of any company in the world. Across everything that Oracle used for Oracle's own use but also then running and hosting and doing clouds services for a wide variety of industries in a wide variety of geography around the world. So Oracle ploys were operating by far the broadest set of Oracle. So we are the biggest influence or on what needed to be done with the product. Likewise, were the first adopter, and so we would take it often times before the lights state on, to really get feedback not only does it work, but is it maintainable, does it perform, is the user experience what it should be, is it secure, all of those things in order to make the product better, and lastly, assuming we are successful with the first two to be the best promoter. So I did a lot of customer facing whether it be one on one customer events all the way up through mega events with tens of thousands of participants, just telling my experience of being CIO and use in Oracle technology at a very large scale

The previous questions are kind of working in a little bit because it does create a challenge, for the 13.5 years I was at Oracle, I lived in Park City, Utah. In fact, it could do that because Oracle's a global company. People reporting to me of the couple thousand people, they were in 54 countries. So running a virtual global organization is kind of a challenge certainly that we have, how do you keep people located in roughly 300 cities, all kind of moving in the same direction. We didn't work with a great deal of really any autonomy to speak up from the standpoint that the idea was to have the whole world standardised on technology solutions and security and all the other things. So, just getting everyone kind of marching in the same direction, in dealing with all the times and since so forth, a certain challenge. But, from a broader perspective, though, it's back to that mission of being biggest influence. Our first adopter really trying to drive the technology by being a big customer Vorpal technology being an early adopter, trying to deal with things before they're fully baked. That's certainly offered challenges. But for my team, it was actually quite exciting as well. In many organisations, they have this big legacy of stuff that's been around for tens of years in many cases, at Oracle, we really didn't have legacy stuff because we're constantly renovating, innovating, updating everything in our entire portfolio. So, it was, really great for the team as long as you like constantly being challenged with new technologies, someone still and fairly early and try to adopt those things, it could be great.