Ex-Oracle president rejects 50 CEO offers

Ray Lane, who last month quit as president and chief operating officer at Oracle, vowed this week that he will never work again as a company executive.

Lane, whose eight-year stint at Oracle made him a billionaire, made the announcement after saying he was to join the board of Sheer Networks, a Silicon Valley startup that creates software to manage telecoms networks.

The 53-year-old former Booz-Allen and Hamilton consultant, who was stripped of his authority at Oracle in a shakeup by chief executive officer Larry Ellison, said he wants to spend more time with his family and concentrate on directorships.

Besides Sheer Networks and Oracle, Lane now serves on the boards of Marimba, C-bridge Internet Solutions and Software Technologies. He is also a director of Special Olympics International.

It's not that Lane's executive skills were unwanted - he said he had more than 50 offers to be chief executive officer at various hi-tech companies. Lane declined to be more specific as to which companies had approached him, however.

"Right now I want to be the one in control of my time. I don't have anything else to prove. If I take another operations role, then it's just me trying to prove something," he said.

But one analyst was sceptical about whether Lane's exile from the cut-and-thrust of executive life will last. Josh Greenbaum, of Enterprise Applications Consulting, felt that Lane would eventually find serving on a board to be less satisfying than running a multi-billion dollar company. "I would take Lane's announcement with a grain of salt," he said.