The End of Greg Maffei's Quasi-Canadian Adventure

It's amazing to see the reward for restructuring a telecom carrier, writing off most of its debt and selling off its Canadian assets is a job as president and CFO with Oracle Corp. Greg Maffei, this is your life! It's a great gig for Maffei, who has spent the last six years running 360Networks Corp., which had lofty aspirations during the telecom boom to be a tier-one North American data network operator. Maffei was lured to Vancouver-based 360Networks with a ton of stock options from Microsoft where he was CFO. Unfortunately, the telecom boom ended soon after Maffei signed on. Stuck with way too much debt, 360Networks filed for bankruptcy protection and promptly went into stealth mode. About a year ago, Maffei, who split his time between Vancouver and Seattle, started to come out of hiding – as he clearly was trying to position himself for a post-360Networks move. He did a series of media interviews talking about how 360Networks was back on its feet after a successful restructuring, and how it had made some strategic acquisitions in the U.S. Et voila – a nice job at Oracle. Silicon Valley This Morning suggests Maffei's extensive M&A and investment experience could be leveraged by Oracle as the software industry consolidates.