P@SHA, in collaboration with the Karachi Chapter of TiE held an interactive session with Mr. Sohaib Abbasi on August 2, 2006.
Sohaib Abbasi is currently the Chairman and CEO of Informatica. A 22-year enterprise software industry veteran, Sohaib Abbasi joined Informatica as president and CEO of Informatica in July 2004.
Prior to Informatica, Mr. Abbasi spent 20 years at Oracle Corporation
where he was most recently a member of Oracle’s executive committee
and was senior vice president of two major divisions, Oracle Tools and Oracle Education.
Mr. Abbasi joined Oracle Corporation in 1982 when it was a 30-person
startup and was instrumental in growing the business from $4 million in annual revenues to over $9 billion in revenues and over 42,000 employees worldwide. As part of his contribution, Mr. Abbasi envisioned and launched the Oracle Tools business, which he grew from zero to $3.75 billion in cumulative license revenues. Mr. Abbasi graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980, where he earned both a B.S. and an M.S. in
computer science.
A little glimpse into 1981, when RSI (as Oracle was known then) released version 2 of what was then called the Oracle database. Sales began growing, but it was still a tough sell to get corporate America to sign on. “To give you an idea of how hard it was, in the first six months we had no sales,” said Sohaib Abbasi, who was one of two sales people who started the Midwest office.
Abbasi got the idea to build prototypes for different companies they were pitching. “For example, for McDonnell Douglas we put a defective part in the database, then did a query about what other parts would be affected by the defective part,” he said.
To win over clients, Abbasi then did something unheard of. On sales calls he asked potential customers what kind of information they wanted out of the database and executed a query on the spot. At conferences, he would even ask audience members to come up with questions and he would translate them into queries. This was startling, considering it would take a programmer days or weeks to solve the problem with a conventional database.
Since the September 11 attacks an Islamic studies program and a professorship have been initiated at the prestigious Stanford University, California, with an endowment of US $9 million. A significant aspect of the program is the generous donation of 2.5 million dollars by Sara and Shoaib Abbasi.
The support provided by the couple for the program — Sohaib and Sara
Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies — includes graduate fellowships, research, new library, strengthened language courses at advanced levels and regular public programs such as lecture series by eminent scholars. At the same time Stanford alumni Lysbeth Warren made a gift of two million dollars for a new professorship on Islam. Both the gifts were matched by the Stanford University with a grant from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, taking the total amount of endowment for the program and professorship to nine million dollars.