Newsmaker: Oracle's fight for Wall Street cred

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Who got these specifications, and what have they said?
Phillips: It's too early to tell, and we're not naming names. It's anyone who is interested, essentially, in the database market. Each one has to come to their own conclusion as to whether it's technically possible and whether they want to dedicate the resources.

It's not a decision that is in our court. We can't force them to announce support for Fusion.

This is not rocket science. You just have to do your homework.

What kind of effort has Oracle done to support and distribute its own brand of Linux?
Phillips: We'll talk about that when its time to talk about that. But the thought is not lost on us that many customers would like us to simplify their environments by having a synchronized stack that includes the application, the database, the middleware, the intelligence tools, the management tools and the operating system. We are the only company in the planet that would be able to give them a one-button upgrade across the stack.

Do you think the time to think about it would be after Fusion is fully under way? Would you have more brainpower and time to delve deeply in that, or would you consider getting into it now and multitasking?
Phillips: Larry (Ellison) is talking about it in the papers, so we've already thought about it.

Oracle has done a lot of acquisitions in the past 15 months, so what holes do you have left in your portfolio?
Phillips: I prefer not to think of them as holes but more as opportunities. We are pretty aggressive on the industry front, and that is where we think SAP is missing the boat. A lot of these customers say it's great that you can do back-office applications, and administrative applications are important, but they are not as important as industry applications that drive revenues and touch customers.

That area is much more complicated and harder to develop because you need people who come out of those areas. Typically, ERP (enterprise resource planning) companies have not been able to do that on their own. That's a legitimate and logical area for acquisitions. We are able to identify the best properties, and a number of them are already Oracle partners, so we know them.

Even though you have done a number of acquisitions in the past 15 months, it doesn't seem to have helped your database sales. Why is that?
Phillips: A lot of these companies (we acquired) were already shipping on the Oracle platform, so it wasn't a new port. I do think that over time, to the extent that some of the companies were supporting multiple databases, the tendency of customers is, they want to buy it all from one company. Our share underneath those applications will go up over time.

When you look at Oracle's database business, it's lumped in with its middleware. Why doesn't Oracle break out its database figures separately? The database is core to Oracle's roots and growth, and some investors would like to see its figures in its own bucket.
Phillips: When you are going through a change, some investors who invested in Oracle when we were only a database company want to gravitate to that. They think that if I just knew that one thing, everything would be OK. Well, we're in many other businesses now, and we're not the same company as we were then. It's one more component, and it's an important one, but it's shrinking as a percentage of the total as we diversify. We will never go back to that, and that's a reality.

People will have to adjust to that, and they are starting to. Our stock is starting to go up, and they are viewing diversification as a positive now.

Listen up

Database and middleware sales figures to remain as one Investors can forget the old days, when Oracle's quarterly database figures were just that--database figures, said its president Charles Phillips. The merging of the quarterly middleware and database figures is a practice that's here to stay.

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Oracle's stock has been largely dormant for several years. Have you thought of issuing a dividend, especially since you generate a ton of cash?
Phillips: Most of the tech sector has been dormant for years, and it's mostly been large-cap stocks. Relative to the rest of the group, we didn't do that badly. But now we're starting to outperform the rest of the group. We're doing well but (aren't) getting credit for it. I like to say were probably the best house in a bad neighborhood. But now they are starting to separate us from the pack.  

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