October 9, 2000

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Women In Technology
Denise Lahey, OracleMobile

By Jennifer Maselli

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ebruary was a busy month for Denise Lahey, CEO of OracleMobile, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle. On the 13th, fiance Roger Bamford, Oracle's principal architect and a helicopter pilot, chartered a helicopter and flew Lahey, his three sons, and a minister to the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a marriage ceremony amid the natural splendor of the setting.

Just days after that, Lahey was thousands of miles away in a completely different setting--a press event at New York's Millennium Hotel for the official launch of OracleMobile, which brings content from Web sites and databases to wireless devices and provides voice-enabled Internet access.

It's fitting that Lahey never goes anywhere without her two-way Blackberry pager. She was thrilled to meet with InformationWeek in Boston in August because it meant she could get off of Martha's Vineyard, where she'd been spending some time planning a belated wedding reception. Not that the New York born-and-bred CEO has anything against the Vineyard--the problem is, she can't get a signal there.

"I work constantly," she says--from the time she leaves her Woodside, Calif., home until late in the night, and that includes obsessively checking her E-mail while Bamford, a gourmet cook, prepares dinner. "Roger could kill me," she says. "He begs me to put the pager away. But I'm always connected. With the Blackberry, I can get my Oracle E-mail and send E-mails instantly all day long. I can access the Web, too. This goes on all night."

Lahey wouldn't have it any other way. The chance to make her vision of a world where people can have anywhere, anytime access to information is the reason Lahey moved to Oracle five years ago, leaving a position as group manager of product management at Sun Microsystems. As VP of Oracle's mobile-products division, Lahey was responsible for the development of Oracle8i Lite and the Internet Application Server Wireless

Edition (formerly known as Oracle Portal-to-Go), which provide the technology foundation for OracleMobile's services.

"Oracle shared my passion for voice and mobile devices," Lahey says. "Larry [Ellison] had this incredible vision and saw that there would be a need to support all of these small devices at some point. So he hired me and gave me the challenge of figuring out how to do it."

She built the mobile-products division into a staff of 150 people who worked to create a version of the Oracle database that can reside in 50 Kbytes of precious memory on Palm Inc. handhelds, cell phones, and pagers, as well as software for pushing content to any wireless device.

"There are 25 different browsers and 10 different servers, and Larry and I were trying to figure out how to make them work together and push content to all of these different devices," she says. When Internet Application Server Wireless Edition finally shipped in November, Lahey began to focus on developing partnerships with content providers, such as stock-quote sites that held the data Oracle wanted to deliver to wireless devices.

"You're really going to access almost everything in the world from some of these devices," she says. "It's important for women to be involved in technology to make sure that a female is thought about within that access." It may sound sexist, but women are still the ones most likely buying the groceries for the family, so equal attention should be given to letting users purchase those items via handhelds as to viewing sports scores, Lahey says.

Last month, Lahey launched OracleMobile into its next phase, unveiling a private-label wireless-hosting service for Internet and application service providers and Internet companies, as well as identifying the first customers for the service. Next on her agenda: developing and hosting custom wireless applications for enterprises.

The 38-year-old Lahey has the advantage of coming of age at a time when women in large numbers can as-pire to a wider range of careers than many of their mothers can have dreamed of. That doesn't include Lahey's own mom, a Ph.D. specializing in language development who now works with her daughter and son-in-law on the Lahey-Bamford Children's Foundation. (One of Lahey's stepsons has a language problem, and the foundation was formed to help children with speech impediments.)

Yet Lahey has felt like the odd man out, so to speak, in some situations. She switched to a computer-science curriculum at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh after an experience interning as a student psychiatric nurse at a hospital convinced her she was in the wrong field. After three years of anatomy, physiology, and science classes, "they told me to go give the woman in room 301 an enema. I just couldn't deal with it," Lahey says. "I went directly to my guidance counselor and changed majors."

Being the only woman in all her computer-science classes was an eye-opening experience. "When I was in nursing there was one guy in our class. We called him the 'male' nurse. Then I got into computer science and I was the only one with all these guys. I was the 'female' geek," she says.

Lahey was also the first woman to join the small staff of Gold Hill Computers, an object-oriented software tools and applications startup in Cambridge, Mass.--a job she took about halfway through a computer-science master's degree program at Northeastern University in Boston. At Northeastern, she was specializing in artificial intelligence, and Gold Hill was working on developing expert systems. There, Lahey wrote computer programs that tied her interest in psychology to her interest in fifth-generation computer systems. She changed to a part-time school schedule in order to work full-time.

It was also while traveling for Gold Hill that Lahey--an avid horsewoman, swimmer, skier, sailor, and tennis player--had one of those experiences that made her think about society's acceptance of women as leaders in technology. "I was struggling to put my 'luggable' computer in the overhead compartment when this man came up to me and said, 'Let me help you. Is that your sewing machine?'" Lahey has never sewn anything in her life.

From Gold Hill, with master's degree in hand, Lahey moved to Sun and California. "I moved from software engineering into product management because I'm a people person and couldn't stay sitting at my computer for very long before I'd get up and see how everyone was doing," she says.

At Sun, Lahey developed multithreading and multiprocessing technology and development tools in the company's languages and tools group. "She was very determined," recalls Jon Kannegard, VP and deputy director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. "We had a running joke. I sent her a picture of myself with seven fingers held up in front of me. That's how many of these widgets I told her we'd sell."

Looking back, Kannegard acknowledges that Lahey was on the right track all along--Lahey's efforts were a success. "She saw something that she wanted and she went after it with all she had. We were lucky to have her," Kannegard says.

FactFile

Title: CEO of OracleMobile Years at Oracle: Five (eight months at OracleMobile) Previous positions at other companies: VP of the mobile products division at Oracle; group manager of product management at Sun; software engineer at Gold Hill Computers Education: B.S. in computer science from the State University of New York; M.S. in computer science from Northeastern University Personal status: Married, three stepchildren Hobbies: Swimming, horse-back riding, skiing, sailing, tennis, reading novels, all things wireless Future goals: Growing OracleMobile into the No. 1 wireless Internet services company; being the technology leader that brings the Internet to the next billion people through wireless devices; making a difference in child development by funding applied research in underfunded areas; raising happy step-children; becoming a scratch golfer; learning to fly helicopters and planes No. of high-level female execs at OracleMobile: Three

Being aggressive is vital to achieving your goals, says Lahey, who notes that even today she's often one of the few women at the meetings she attends. "As a woman, you have to be more direct, more aggressive than normal in order to make people hear you out," Lahey says. As hard as she pushes the limits at Oracle, she's always found time to encourage other women to push themselves.

"I was a mentor to a girl in East Palo Alto, Calif., while I worked at Sun," Lahey says. "Her family wanted her to work after high school so she could help them with bills. But I said no way--she has got to go to college. She went to San Francisco State," she recalls with a proud smile.

Lahey continues to be involved in mentoring programs for women and, as a CEO, she actively seeks out qualified women to work in her organization. But it's a challenge, she acknowledges. "Oracle hires engineers from the top schools, and you don't see as many women coming out with engineering degrees," Lahey says. "We should encourage women to pursue mathematics and science.

Getting ahead at a high-tech company has required real dedication--and sacrifice. Most of Lahey's weekends are spent writing presentations for OracleMobile, leaving her little time for the sports she loves. She's not complaining, though, and she's quick to give credit to the women she says make even greater sacrifices. "My VP has two young children, she has to travel constantly, and she works crazy hours. I don't know how she does it," she says.

What else might women entering the high-tech field today need to be prepared for? Perhaps the fact that in some ways, things haven't changed much since the days Lahey was in computer-science class at Plattsburgh. "I'm speaking on a panel in September, and there are pictures of everyone on the panel," she says. "All CEOs. All men. And then there's me."

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