Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea (Part 2)

SM: What role did you play at Tesseract?

MB: I was part of senior management and ran all of engineering. Coming into the early 1990s another team was forming to start a company called Scopus Technologies. There were a gaggle of companies going into what we termed field sales automation or a contact center; it was not called a CRM yet. The scope of an app was just exploding. SAP stands for Systems Applications and Processes. It later morphed into MRP and then ERP, after which things began to get bolted onto ERP. The definition of applications was rapidly expanding. In some cases what was attempted to be automated was borderline lunacy.

There were some really hard core functions such as automating a sales force or a pipeline. Tracking a customer call and companies like Genesis tapped on and said “when a customer calls in lets go through an ACD and IVR and do a screen pop simultaneously to a contact center reps desk. We focused on contact centers and a lot of telephony. We realized they are highly configurable. We wrote our apps in a language nobody had really heard of called Tcl, which today is PHP, Perl and Tcl.

That allowed us to do so much configurability. We focused on a slice of a growing market and did it in a way that was just massively configurable. We did well and built a 400 person company. We went public. I remember the day I was in the Bank of America building going up the elevator early in the morning to watch our symbol go live on Wall Street.

SM: What stage was Scopus at when you joined?

MB: I came onboard after version 1 of the project. Siebel came along and made an offer for the company after we went public. Before the merger closed, in 1994, I got a phone call from a gentleman named Larry Ellison. I knew the name but figured he had no reason to be calling me. He laughed when I told him that I did not believe it was Larry Ellison. He told me to write down a phone number, which I did and then I called it.

It dialed into Oracle, and I could hear him laughing in the background when his secretary answered the phone. He then said “Do you believe it is Larry Ellison now?” I said “I am at 99%!” I went over to his house and spent the morning together brainstorming about applications, ERP, and the state of the industry. He made me an offer to come join Oracle as part of the management team for applications.

SM: Oracle was not involved with applications at the time, were they?

MB: They had their ERP in core financials. It was a big decision because my entire career had been with small companies and I felt in complete control of my destiny. It was a family environment. We would come in the morning and change the direction of the company overnight. The concept of scale was not there. I ultimately decided it would open my perspective and perhaps I had something to offer. I took a role on the apps team and ended up leading all core apps on the CRM. I was part of the executive management team and reported to Larry directly.

It was pre-Internet effectively, so it was still a client server product. When you start to operate at scale you can think differently. You can have a customer advisory team and rely on other people’s instincts, not just your own. You can afford industry reports. You can spend a few million on marketing. You think differently and listen to others. You collect various opinions, yet you never lose sight of instinct.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Enabling Ecological Data Centers: Rackable Systems CEO Mark Barrenchea
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