Interview with Geoff Squire OBE

Geoffrey (Geoff) Squire was born in 1947 in Gloucester. His father was a Post Office Clerical Officer, running the Post Office counter there.  Geoff honed his arithmetic skills helping his father balance the daily transactions (in Pounds, Shillings and Pence).  His mother had been a governess (private tutor) before working in the post office. He has an older sister.

 Geoff attended Calton Road Primary school in Gloucester between 1952 and 1958. He enjoyed his school life saying: “It was great fun, I met lots of people, played in all the sports teams, did singing and all sorts of things. I loved my time at the primary school and the grammar school.”

Having easily passed his Eleven Plus, Geoff went to the Crypt Grammar School, one of the oldest schools in England, founded in 1539. Geoff says: “There was a church in Gloucester called St Mary De Crypt which the school belonged to, it was a very prestigious school, very well respected.  I was very lucky to go there and had some wonderful teachers including an English teacher called Charles Lepper who used to be a professional actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Sadly, he went deaf, so he went into teaching. … I also had a couple of wonderful maths masters, Messrs Paget and Smith, who helped me get to where I was mathematically.”  In his final year at Crypt, Geoff won prizes for the highest O-Level results in Maths and History.

 Geoff was very active during his school and home life, playing chess and bridge, singing in the church choir, teaching and playing the piano at Sunday school, doing church work, raising funds, running church fete stalls, being in the dramatic society, singing in Gloucester grand opera group, and playing rugby which he continued to play into his mid thirties.

 University was not discussed either at school or at home so having completed his studies, he set out to find a job.

Geoff’s father arranged for him to train as a chartered accountant with a local company, however Geoff spotted an advert for a trainee accountant with Gloucester County Council which promised to pay more after he had finished his training. He joined the Council in 1963 and stayed until 1966. He says: “I was just 17, and an opportunity occurred that changed my life.  A note was included in the payslip envelope of the tenth or eleventh payday of my life, which said, “The Council are thinking of buying a new computer, they will need a programmer, anyone interested?” Geoff applied, won the aptitude test and got the job. As a result he never finished his accountancy training, however says of the training he did do: “What I learned there held me in great stead to be Chairman and CEO of public companies on both sides of the Atlantic because I could read balance sheets and understand all the financial things. I love numbers so it was good fun.”

Geoff’s first computer was an ICT 1301, programmed in machine code. Geoff says: “There weren’t any compilers in those days. It only had 1200 words of memory to play with, that’s 12-character words and so, basically, you had that number of pigeonholes to put things in. I still remember that if I wanted to read something from a pigeonhole, the instruction was 37 and then a 4-digit number and if wanted to write it away, it was 64 and the same 4 digit number. You had to remember where you actually stuck the numbers and keep a memory map of all the data that you were using.”

Geoff’s first project was to write an application for expenditure analysis, he explains: “I had to analyse every single bill that came into the council – education, health, police, etc. I still remember crying because a print run that took about 10 hours didn’t print the total out. My boss, Gwilym James, told me not to worry, showed me how to print a store dump, and I neatly hand wrote the totals at the bottom”

At the age of 19, Geoff moved to Peterborough to take a programming role at Newall Engineering which had just taken delivery of one of the first 1900 series from ICT, a competitor to the IBM1401. Geoff says: “It was a word machine, it had a small memory and therefore needed overlay programming. I was really following technology trends even though I was only 19. I thought it was important to get a newer machine onto my CV.”  Geoff worked on stock control applications.

After Newall Engineering, Geoff moved to Wall’s Ice Cream, part of Unilever. Once again, Geoff was working on the 1900 series which Wall’s had installed. He says: “What really, really surprised me, because I was just 20 at the time, was that they gave me a management position. One of my employees was a chap who had been the chief programmer at Gloucester County Council, who was 10 years older than me.”

Geoff built the Stock Control systems, and gained his first insight into advanced database management techniques such as B-Tree indexes and in-memory tables.

In 1970, Geoff joined Datalogic in the early days of the company’s development when it was just seven people run by Brian Tannatt-Nash. The first project that Geoff worked on was the Forward Trust Credit Sale application. He then project managed a turnkey application for Book Club Associates. The project required a complete set of programmes written on the 1900, Geoff adds: “It went live dead on time and implemented a very advanced mail order system. It was very, very efficiently written, with some interesting programming challenges because they had spools of tape coming in from all of their regions.  If you’ve ever loaded a tape, it takes about two or three minutes to put a tape up and get it to rewind and start again in the right position.  So, I wrote a bit of code that basically fooled the operating system to make all of these disparate tapes look as if they were a continuous multi-reel so you could load up half a dozen tapes and the whole job ran in a handful of minutes rather a few hours.

Geoff also worked on an important Midland Bank project. He says: “It was a large project, with Datalogic doing the database updating and CAP doing the branch transactions. Together we built the Midland Bank Branch Accounting System for 2200 branches on a Burroughs B6700.  It was a great project and probably helped me on my career in ICL afterwards because ICL’s New Range, or 2900 Series as it became, was very similar to the Burroughs B6700, which was a reverse Polish notation stack machine. I could talk eloquently about how this beautiful machine worked while everyone else was still scratching their heads working it out but I’d actually worked on a similar system for 18 months.”

In 1973 Geoff moved to ICL as New Range Data Management Consultant. He was to be part of a new team of four that would focus on the retail sector. Unfortunately, just as he joined, the man in charge of the team left and the team was disbanded. Geoff  was sent to Manchester to work in regional customer support. He says: “I worked in the Northern Retail sales region had some important customers, including Woolworths, Co-op, Vestric (part of Glaxo), and the Burton Group. The job of the support team was basically to make sure that the customers were well-supported, write the proposals, and make sure there wasn’t any trouble in the sites.” However, overhearing a conversation in a Manchester pub, Geoff discovered there was a problem in one of the sites – the new Woolco hypermarket in Liverpool. Geoff says: “I got involved and for my sins, ended up as the project manager of ICL’s first-ever foray into Point-of-Sale systems. This was before they bought Singer.” He goes on to add: “Somebody at ICL Putney had thought systems integration was a great idea and they had bought a Dietz processor from Germany, an HP Tape Deck, some odd point of sale tills and I had to make all this lot work together with a fixed deadline because the customer had to open the store.”  Geoff did get it all to work with ‘lots of 20-hour days’ and a team comprising a retail specialist, a systems analyst and three programmers.

Geoff’s ICL career saw him move to Leeds as project manager at Burtons, and he  then applied for a corporate project management job in Bracknell. Geoff explains: “All of the Sales Divisions realised that to sell New Range they had to convince the customer to convert or rewrite their 1900 or System 4 applications for the new computers. This had the impact of making every single natural upgrade into a competitive sale, and they were effectively inviting IBM in. However, there was a sort of skunk development project called DME, which effectively made 1900 software work on 2900 hardware, through microcode. The project was to validate and QA the product and take it to market. No one at HQ would touch that with a barge pole because it was political dynamite. It had to compete with all the resources of Ed Mack and his product development group. They needed somebody from the sticks to do it; and that was me. It made my name in ICL because DME effectively saved the company that year and delivered 29 2960 systems into revenue” In addition to running the technical project, Geoff also gave all the customer sales presentations, and as a result he was offered the role of worldwide marketing manager, initially for medium systems and later adding large systems to his responsibilities.

Geoff left ICL in early 1981 to join CACI as a venture manager after a conversation in Camberley rugby club with a Cornish front row forward called Tony Carter. Geoff says: “He introduced me to this wonderful company called CACI, who were well-known in the data and market research world and he convinced me to join as a venture manager.  Venture manager means you run your own business, find your own customers and hire your own people. The CACI coaches told us how to do it.  They said, “Well, you ring everyone you’ve ever respected technically and see if they’ll come and work for you and then ring everybody you’ve ever done a good job for and see if they’ll hire you as a consultant.”

The scheme was successful in the US but Geoff soon realised it would not work in Europe because of different employment rules. He adds: “They needed a different model and the model they needed had to include selling products.” Simultaneously, Geoff was given the task of building an MIS system for CACI, and, as a database consultancy, it seemed sensible to build it on the newest technology – relational database. The project manager, Chris Ellis, did some analysis and the clear technical winner was this new product from California called Oracle.

However Chris was uncomfortable because Oracle had no support capability in the UK. However, Geoff contacted the owner, Larry Ellison, and signed a three-year exclusive sales, support and marketing agreement for Oracle in the UK. This solved the business model issue and gave the MIS team the best product to work with. Geoff adds: “That’s how Oracle started in the UK.” About a year into the distribution contract, Geoff was in an American style planning session with his CACI US bosses and one of them said “You need someone big and ugly tramping the streets and selling this stuff 100% of the time”. Enter Mike Evans, 6’ 6” tall and one of Geoff’s DME colleagues from ICL.

At the end of the three year term, Oracle decided to set up a direct subsidiary and Geoff became Managing Director, Oracle UK, and, a couple of years later he was promoted to CEO of Oracle Europe. A key strategy of Oracle UK was to run a series of seminars entitled 4GE (4^th Generation Environment). Using industrial theatre techniques, this programme ran for several years and 200 prospects filled the Mayfair Hotel theatre every couple of weeks to hear executive presentations and see live demos. Oracle doubled revenue in ten out of its first 11 years, and Oracle UK tripled for its first three years. 29 people sat down for Christmas dinner in Valcheros in Richmond in the first year, and someone said that if we kept on growing we would soon need the Albert Hall. In 1988, 1100 staff and their partners sat down in the Royal Albert Hall for their Christmas dinner. Geoff and Chris Ellis sang Offenbach’s Gendarmes duet on that famous stage, and the professional entertainment was provided by a young Rory Bremner and the Bootleg Beatles.

Oracle sold well across Europe – over 50% of worldwide revenue – but in the early1990s, when the company had some difficulties in the US, Geoff became President of Worldwide Operations. He explains: “ I always remember the conversation, Larry rang me up and he said, “Geoff, I want you to take over International” which effectively meant adding 10% to my revenue and about 300% to my workload because it meant travelling to South America, Asia Pacific, Middle East etc.  I said to him, “That’s not where you need my skills, you need me in America, so, let’s do it the other way around, I’ll run America and Europe, and you run International.” He said “I’ll think about it.”  He rang me back about an hour later, “Have the lot” he said. That’s how I became President of Oracle Worldwide Operations.”

Geoff set out his priorities – change things in the US and build Japan. He explains: “The first thing I did was basically fix America by changing all their business ratios to match Europe’s successful model, doing a major cull, and focussing on cash collection.

Despite Geoff’s successes in Europe and the USA, Larry Ellison actually thinks Japan was Geoff’s finest achievement, because that had never been done before.  There had never been an American company successful in Japan.  Geoff followed his successful model in Europe and hired a complete Japanese management team from the CEO downwards. Geoff says, “ I think that I got lucky with the CEO. He was from IBM, mature, and had been fast-tracked by IBM including a spell at Harvard. However he had just been passed over for the top job so he was ready for a new opportunity. Sano-san was amazing, so I listened and let him and his all-Japanese management team do it their way, and just gave them oversight and soft guidance.

Attracting talent in Japan was the biggest challenge. At that time, Japan had a culture of lifetime employment, so getting senior staff to move was tough. Also, university graduates clamoured for the big Japanese names – Toyota, Sony etc – and their second choice was subsidiaries of global companies – Shell, Unilever, IBM etc. Geoff and Sano-san realised they needed to do something different, so they set up a university inside the company called the Oracle Japan University. Geoff adds: “We offered them specialist training in some advanced technology like databases, AI and CASE.  We built an office where none of the desks were square, they were all amoeboid shape, so that people could sit in a relaxed environment.  They had goldfish and dogs, parrots, and all sorts of things in the office.  He created a fun environment that young people coming out of university might see as a bit different to sitting in 44 square feet of IBM office and we hired some of the most amazing talent and trained our own. That’s where all the technical people came from.” The team did development and translation work, translating the products into Japanese, which no competitor did. Geoff adds: “We were growing very quickly and very soon passed the magic 10 billion Yen.” Oracle Japan later went public on the Nikkei exchange.

Geoff left Oracle at the end of 1993 having helped the company grow from $5million to almost $2billion.

During his time at Oracle, Geoff also found time to make his first private equity investment. Two of his CACI colleagues, Clive and Edwina Humby, were leaving CACI to set up a new venture, Dunn Humby Associates. Geoff backed them financially and with a bit of mentoring. DHA won the contract with Tesco to develop the analytics for the ClubCard project, and was later acquired by Tesco.

After leaving Oracle, Geoff joined Open Vision. He went from 6000 staff to six! He says: “It was interesting. It was a Warburg Pincus start-up. Mike Fields, who had worked for me as President of Oracle USA, persuaded Warburg Pincus to do a series of 21 acquisitions of technology companies and assets to cover operations, performance, security, and systems (OPSS).  Mike integrated lots of different technology and the idea was to put them all together to compete with CA.” After a few months of running things in Europe, Geoff was invited to become CEO. He says: “The first thing I did was to stem the losses and downsize, I went from 308 people to 163 in a couple of days using a relational database technique called ‘row delete’ – anyone called Senior Vice-President and anyone called Strategic anything had to go. We’d got an infrastructure that could have run IBM.  I went back to Larry Ellison’s basic rule, which was, if you don’t sell and you don’t program, tell me real slow what you do?  One of Larry’s classic lines.”

Under Geoff’s leadership, the company became profitable and he led an IPO in 1996. He says: “We’d been public about a year when we were approached by Veritas to do a merger.”  Geoff became Joint Chairman and ran worldwide sales and operations. Under his watch, Veritas built a large international software corporation with a combination of organic growth and the acquisition and integration of the data side of Seagate Software. In the DotCom boom Veritas had sales revenue of 1.2 billion dollars and achieved a Market Capitalisation of 60 times revenue. In 2005, Veritas was acquired by Symantec.

During this time Geoff was also Chairman of six other Warburg Pincus portfolio companies.

Very shortly after leaving Veritas, Geoff got a call from Sohaib Abbasi, an old colleague from Oracle days. Sohaib was the CEO of Informatica which was a Data Integration company with about $200 million of revenue. He was looking to strengthen his Board, and Geoff joined as a Non Executive Director. Geoff chaired the  strategy committee which had the single goal of getting the Company to a billion dollars of profitable revenue using a combination of acquisition and organic growth. Geoff says simply “This was achieved, and the Company was sold in a private equity transaction.”

Geoff was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the IT profession, and was also awarded one of the very first Honorary Doctorates by Oxford Brookes University.

He and his wife Fiona set up a grant-giving Charitable Foundation in 2001, and support many Charities involved in disability sports, special needs education and medicine in the UK.

Geoff says he was saved from his biggest mistake by somebody else. He explains: “I nearly left Gloucester County Council for a few hundred a year more money and I nearly took a job as the only programmer at Shipton RDC.  The chap said, “I’m not going to take you out of the County Council, you’re too good to come and waste your life with me” which was very kind.  It was nearly the biggest mistake.“

“The biggest mistake I’ve made is probably in my private equity world by mistiming exits, turning down offers, and not recognising when something has run its course and  not shutting companies down when I should have done.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by T P Transcription Services

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley