 committee that was setting standards for database interfaces and this small company came to the table and in 1977 the table was filled with with the then dominant monopolist IBM and all of the other extremely large companies that made hardware and from the hardware vendors you bought your software as well and they all had their own products that did database management and and and they all had their own interfaces and this small company came to the table and said well we're gonna build a product and we we want to have a seat at this table and help you define the standard for that product today everyone knows that small company that was founded in 1977 by the name of its first product and that was Oracle so the reason was unfortunate for me is if I've been there I would not be here today because I'd be too rich and I wouldn't bother right but I I was instead working for the government and I saw Oracle a company with 14 employees send employee number 14 to the table and sit toe to toe side by side with IBM and Univac and Bull and Siemens and to find the interface for for relational database management products they had an equal seat at the table it was an open forum now you might say Larry Alson was just the smartest guy in the world to recognize the benefit of open standards on his then unreleased product or just he was really really really lucky but whether it was serendipity or it was foresight the fact is a major aspect in the success of Oracle was they brought to market a product at the same time that a standard was issued for that product that gave the the marketplace the comfort that they could try out this new approach to database that this was a standard conforming product and in fact it was sufficiently important at the time that the United States government actually initiated at the National Bureau of Standards a conformance process whereby for federal procurement only they actually certified that that Oracle's products and IBM's products and digital's products a lot of people who are gone products basically conform to this now this new standard okay so first answer to the first question you know why is Oracle advocate for open standards open standards are in Oracle's DNA that's where they started and much later in the game I came to the party to help oversee how they participated open standards are about interoperability in the IT space we set