Softwar

by Matthew Symonds

  Ellison can hardly contain himself. With an almost beatific smile he embarks on a well-practiced riff: “A single national medical records database would save thousands of lives every year by preventing dangerous combinations of drugs from being prescribed. And a national health records database would save billions of dollars because it is so much cheaper to run than all those separate medical records systems we currently use. You have to be willing to save money if you want to save lives.” For example, Walgreen and Rite Aid, two of the biggest pharmacy chains, have built database systems to record patients’ prescriptions and to issue alerts about possibly dangerous drug interactions. But they’re entirely separate systems that can’t communicate with each other, so if you don’t always buy your medicine from the same chain, they won’t be able to help you. Ellison asks, “How much are we spending on medical record keeping out of the $1.3 trillion we spend on health care each year? I’ve heard estimates as high as thirty cents on the dollar, or nearly $400 billion. We’d save half of that—$200 billion—if we had a national medical records database. And with one medical records database we’d get better privacy and better accuracy. But most important, we’d save lives. The opportunity is extraordinary.” Thompson thinks that record keeping may be costing “only” eighteen cents on the dollar, but he gets the point. “It’s so shameful,” he says, “but how do we do it?”

  As Ellison expands his thoughts, explaining how it would be possible for all parties to keep their existing databases if they wanted to, as long as they agreed to copy everything that went into them into one central database, Thompson again asks, “How do I accomplish this?” Thompson’s problem is that, understandably, he feels overwhelmed by the scale of the task before him. He’s already encountering bureaucratic inertia and special-interest-group pushback of a kind that fourteen years as governor of Wisconsin haven’t prepared him for. It’s even possible that he’s beginning to fear that in the three and a half years left to him in the job, he may end up achieving little of what he wants to do. And here comes Ellison, not just singing from the same hymn sheet, not just telling him what the problems are, but offering solutions.

  Ellison has two suggestions. The first is that Thompson, who says he wants to introduce “paperless” hospitals and self-service check-in for patients, should meet with the Oracle/HealthSouth team. The second is that Thompson should follow the same path as Ellison when he started turning Oracle into an e-business—start with some “cheap thrills” that will demonstrate to skeptics what’s possible and use the cost savings they generate to fund more ambitious projects. “Start with e-mail,” says Ellison. “We could replace all your e-mail systems with just one unified system in ninety days. If we don’t eliminate seventy-five percent of your e-mail costs, I’ll personally pay for it.” Thompson is so impressed that he wants to know from his advisers whether he can start on it right away without putting out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to allow other vendors to bid. Ellison’s story about how Oracle succeeded in halving its IT budget and getting “dramatically better information” in the process has gotten him hooked.

  On the way out, Ellison asks me, “Could we have had a meeting like that before September eleventh? I don’t think so.” Nussbaum adds, “You’re not kidding. Something really changed in this town. People want to do things they would never have dared before.” Next stop for Ellison is a helicopter ride to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland to have dinner with its director, Lieutenant General Michael Hayden. On September 13, the NSA asked Oracle for assistance at the “premier technical level” and Oracle offered to give any help that was needed. Oracle’s chief corporate architect, a very bright, very laid back young engineer named Ed Screven who oversees all the company’s development work, is taking a polygraph test this week to get full security clearance. The following morning Ellison will be seeing the directors of both the FBI (Robert Mueller) and the CIA (George Tenet) who, in a sign of the times, will be together with their respective senior teams at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Lunch is scheduled to be with Attorney General John Ashcroft.

  For security reasons, I’m not able to be present at any of these meetings, but Ellison has promised to tell me as much as he prudently can when we fly to New York on Thursday evening. Late on Wednesday, when Ellison returns from the NSA, I meet him for a drink in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton. He says, “The good news is that we’re making real progress on gathering information about the bad guys. The bad news is that the bad guys are very bad—pure evil. There is no limit on what they’re willing to do to harm us. If they could kill us all, they would.”

  The next day I meet Ellison outside the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue after his lunch with Attorney General Ashcroft. Our next appointment is at the Pentagon with the Comptroller at the Defense Department, and after that we’re going to the Hill to see an old friend of Ellison, the former mayor of San Francisco and now the senior California senator, Dianne Feinstein. Senator Feinstein has asked to see Ellison after reading his article in The Wall Street Journal, as she will be chairing a hearing of the terrorism subcommittee on Friday. But I’m eager for news of the morning. The time spent at Langley was impressively productive, but although Ellison is slightly reluctant to admit it, his encounter with Ashcroft was something of a disappointment. He says that Ashcroft seemed to be rather remote and unwilling to talk about anything substantive. His main preoccupation was privacy legislation, which makes the job of law enforcement more difficult—how can we be expected to catch terrorists when the law forbids a parent to have access to her own child’s exam results?

  On the way to the Pentagon, Kevin Fitzgerald explains that the Defense Department has put out an RFP for a commercial financial system that would be used servicewide. It’s likely to be a bake-off between SAP and Oracle. Fitzgerald says it could be one of the biggest financial applications deals ever, with the opportunity to sell other E-Business Suite applications that need to be integrated into the financials package. Although Oracle is not heavy-handedly making the point that it would be odd for the Pentagon to buy German, Fitzgerald wants to hire the lobbying company of the previous defense secretary, William Cohen.

  We then head back across town to the Hart Senate Office Building for a meeting with Senator Feinstein. When Feinstein joins us in her conference room, she embraces Ellison tenderly and starts pumping him for views and information she can use at the next day’s hearing. She’s particularly exercised about the lax oversight of the 30 million or so temporary visitors to the United States each year. Without an adequate tracking system, she says, our country has become a sieve, creating ample opportunities for terrorists to enter and establish their operations without detection. Ellison talks about his national ID plan and how he would make it mandatory for anyone entering the country to have a visa and a card with biometric information on it.4 Whipping out his wallet, he asks her to compare the sophistication of his credit card—a black Centurion American Express card—with the shoddy and easily forgeable little piece of cardboard that is his commercial pilot’s license. Feinstein is so appalled that she immediately gets an aide to fire off a letter to the secretary of transportation.

  For much of her legislative career, Feinstein has been promoting precisely the kind of privacy measures that are now making the job of the security agencies so difficult. She rather limply suggests that Ellison’s plan would provoke a huge uproar, but she doesn’t protest much when Ellison points out that we’ve already lost our privacy thanks to the easily available information on nearly all of us that the credit card firms are prepared to hawk. He says, “I’m for privacy; I’m against secrecy. The Constitution doesn’t give anyone the right to have multiple stolen identities.” Feinstein is even prepared to admit that the existing privacy laws have gone too far. “We’ll pay the piper for it,” she says. Feinstein also wants to hear more about Ellison’s offer to donate the software for the national security database. Ellison confirms it while explaining that he’s tal
king about just the software, not the labor or network or hardware. Whether Feinstein understands exactly what he is proposing is uncertain, but she calls it “the best offer we’ve had all day” and asks Ellison if he’ll put his offer in a letter that she can brandish at her committee’s hearing next day.

  Descending the steps of Congress into the warm autumn sunshine, Ellison seems suddenly overwhelmed by emotion. “I can’t help thinking about how close we came to losing this building . . . how the Capitol dome could have come crashing down on top of all those people we picked to represent us. I look at that dome now, and I see something quite fragile, something that needs to be protected.”

  Jay Nussbaum is there to meet us at the Dulles Jet Center, where the G5 is waiting to take us up to New York. Bustling toward us, he can’t wait to tell Ellison that not only has Tommy Thompson’s office been in touch to get things moving on Ellison’s e-mail offer (though there’s some nervousness about their boss’s determination to cut through red tape and give Oracle “sole vendor” status without an RFP), but the FBI has been on the phone seven times in the course of the afternoon. “Jeez,” says Nussbaum, “I’ve never known anything like it. This is something completely different. I’m just stunned.”

  • • •

  On the plane, Ellison and I settle down to discuss the last forty-eight hours and the way that Oracle is finding itself in the front line of the administration’s war against terrorism. Ellison reflects, “Our first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency, our second customer was the Defense Intelligence Agency, and our third customer was the National Security Agency. At the very beginning of my career, I was building information systems for these intelligence agencies, and here I am, at the end of my career, building information systems for the same intelligence agencies. What’s different is their sense of urgency. Since the attack of September eleventh, this town’s been on a war footing. The last time things moved this fast was World War II.”

  Since his Wall Street Journal article, Ellison has noted how ironic it is that credit databases for managing financial risk do a much better job of tracking people around the world than the intelligence databases do. What sort of conversation was Oracle having with the intelligence agencies to improve the situation? “The intelligence that’s gathered has to be analyzed efficiently and shared appropriately among the different agencies. We need to provide the analysts with the appropriate data-mining and analysis tools so they’re not overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that’s being gathered. That’s what we focused on today.”

  I knew that Ellison had been pretty appalled by the neglected state of the FBI’s systems after the chronic underinvestment during the Clinton years—the agency wasn’t even using the Internet to connect its people. How bad was it? “They’re like most large companies: they have lots of separate automation systems, which means their data is badly fragmented. Their procedures are inconsistent from department to department: some of their procedures are automated, others are still manual. Their internal network needs to be upgraded. The FBI has tremendous human resources—great people—but their computer systems are in desperate need of modernization.

  “The question is, how quickly can the FBI’s information management and communication systems be upgraded? That depends on who does the work. I think we can do it fast. We can install a secure e-mail and document-sharing system within ninety days, guaranteed. That’s easy. We can also get version one of the national security database up and running in ninety days. That’s much harder. We’d have to use the Oracle database development team to do the work. And we’d have to work in shifts, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. But it could be done.”

  How much could Ellison tell me about the meeting at the CIA? “Just like at the NSA last night, the primary focus was on the analyst. We have to get better at filtering out the irrelevant information. It really is the needle-in-the-haystack problem, except it’s a really big haystack called the planet earth. We’re very good at collecting information using satellites and computers, but you have to organize the information properly, and you have to provide the right tools so the analysts can do their jobs. You’ve got to store vast amounts of data very efficiently, or your data-mining, pattern-matching and predictive modeling software will run too slowly to be of any use. And there has to be a single standard for exchanging information between intelligence agencies. When the CIA provides information to the FBI about a bad guy, both agencies’ computer systems need to be speaking the same language. The data model for tracking people in both agencies must be the same.”5

  Given the traditional degree of interagency rivalry and distrust, are the CIA and FBI really prepared to go down the shared-data-model path that Ellison is advocating? “I think so. We talked about it at length in the meeting at Langley. Everyone agreed, and I expect the FBI to move very quickly now. The FBI has a greatly expanded mission, so they need new systems. I think Bob Mueller understands the size of the job in front of him. Before September eleventh, you couldn’t get the first draft of a Request for Proposal out in ninety days. Now the FBI is talking about building a complete new computer system in ninety days. I’ve been working with these agencies the whole of my professional life, and I’ve never seen anything like it. These days, everyone in Washington is extremely focused and working hard. They have a new sense of urgency, motivated by a great and deep concern about the security of our country. They want to make sure that the events of September eleventh aren’t repeated. We’re at war—you can feel it.”

  • • •

  Ellison’s first appointment in New York is to record an interview about his ID card proposals for the CBS Evening News. However, when we arrive at the studios on West Fifty-seventh Street, the place is in an uproar. The news has just broken that an employee across the way at NBC has contracted anthrax poisoning from a letter sent to the studio. There’s great anxiety, subsequently confirmed, that Dan Rather, the CBS News star anchorman, and an assistant may have come into contact with a similarly booby-trapped letter. Ellison’s interview with Anthony Mason has to take place in what looks like a storeroom because the studio we have been sitting in has to be swept for possible contamination.

  Despite all the turmoil, the planned CEO roundtable is scheduled to go ahead. Among the guests are the home goddess Martha Stewart and the CEOs of ADP (a big provider of payroll services), UBS PaineWebber, and 1-800-Flowers.com. Also present are Ross Perot, Jr., the son of the former presidential candidate and now the CEO of Perot Systems, and Lex Fenwick, an Englishman who is running the financial news agency Bloomberg while his boss is campaigning to succeed Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York. But the person who is likely to get Ellison’s closest personal attention is Andrew Benton, the president of Pepperdine University in Malibu, where Ellison’s son, David, has just started his freshman year.

  Inevitably, they all want Ellison to talk about his ID card plan and the national security database that goes with it, and what sort of reception Ellison’s ideas received in Washington. He’s happy to oblige, and, of course, it all neatly segues into the perennial theme of the urgent need to consolidate data if you want to know what’s going on, whether you’re running a federal agency or a business. But when Ellison gets on to telling them about the E-Business Suite and how it can help them both save money and get better information, he senses that he’s lost their full attention. Maybe some of them have heard the pitch, while others find the idea of spending a lot of money to upgrade their systems with fancy new software just plain inappropriate for the times. He decides to try something new, even though Jay Nussbaum has advised him against it because it hasn’t yet been fully thought through.

  The night before, in Washington, during a meeting with Diebold, a systems integrator specializing in security and servicing ATMs, Ellison came up with a new customer offer. Diebold’s boss, Wally O’Dell, told Ellison that while he didn’t need convincing about 11i conceptually, he wasn’t in a mood to take any risks when it came to uncertain returns fr
om investing in new software. If Ellison really believed what he was saying about the suite, what about shifting some of the risk to Oracle? Ellison told O’Dell that if he gave him his existing IT budget, he’d reduce it by 5 percent each year for the next five years and provide him with completely new systems, everything that Diebold needs to run its business. As a company in the IT business, Diebold might be expected to have little enthusiasm for such an innovative outsourcing deal. But the opposite is true: O’Dell is very interested indeed.

  And so are the CEOs in New York. Ellison says, “We’ll give you all our E-Business Suite software for free; we’ll give you the computer hardware for free; we’ll give you the network for free. Our consultants will upgrade your entire company to the E-Business Suite for free. We’ll pay for everything. In return, you pay us your existing IT budget, and we’ll guarantee to reduce it by five percent per year for the next five years. We’ll sign a contract and guarantee it. And we have $7 billion in cash in the bank to back it up. You’ll get a single global customer database. You’ll get secure e-mail. You’ll get the whole E-Business Suite. And you’ll get it all for a lot less than you’re spending now. There’s no up-front cost. Your IT expenses go down immediately. We make the investment, we take the risk—you get a fixed, predictable bill.”