Newsmaker: Who says Oracle's finished?

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pretty good process down now, and in fact, where people calling us to ask us how we did (the PeopleSoft deal) so quickly.

I think, given the skill set that we have, we're not limited, we don't have to focus on one size deal or the other. I do think we'll be opportunistic when price makes sense. Obviously we have an ongoing process; we're reviewing a lot of those opportunities, but nothing has really changed, and we don't have to limit ourselves.

Do you feel like you've digested the PeopleSoft acquisition completely?
Phillips: I think that we've digested it. I mean, we didn't have one of these plans where we evaluate everything for nine months and slowly start to make changes. We made the changes in the first 30 days. And people are again still asking how we did that, so I think the speed served us as well, because it gave clarity to customers. I think it gave clarity to employees too. We're able to get out in front of the customers quickly and not be bogged down in internal meetings.

So, that was done in the first 30 days, and then the last remaining infrastructure pieces on the back end of the IT stuff was done a couple of months ago. So, there's not anything remaining. We're operating as a single company and moving forward.

Do you see any need to kind of realignment along vertical lines, and are you forced to sell slightly differently than you have in the past?
Phillips: We're doing that as we get deeper into selected verticals. So we're not doing a wholesale reorganization the way IBM did. We don't need to do that, and that's disruptive. But certainly, as we build our products and verticals, or make acquisitions like Retek, we create organizations around them.

Retek has been run as the Oracle retail business unit, and that's a vertical business unit within Oracle globally. We'll do more of that, but build it incrementally over time. It doesn't make sense to do that until you have more content in any particular industry.

So it's safe to say that acquisitions might fill in the content that you're talking about, with one company serving as a point for a particular vertical?
Phillips: Yes. The important part of our strategy going forward in terms of acquisitions will be adding more vertical market content and getting people in who are very strong in those verticals.

You take a guy like Duncan Angove, who came from Retek and who now runs the Oracle retail business unit. All he has done in his entire career is retailing, and he just speaks a different language. That's very helpful for this organization, because they connect with customers in a different way than someone walking in and talking about NetWeaver.

One of the things we heard about the PeopleSoft acquisition was that existing JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers were going to hold off on buying new software. Have you already been able to sell new applications to some of the existing customer base?
Phillips: Yes, we had a very good quarter last quarter, and that wouldn't have happened unless those customers stepped up and said, "I like what you're doing, I'm comfortable."

And I personally had lots of meetings with groups of CIOs one-on-one, just explaining the strategy, and once they hear it, they're fine. They've also heard about what we're doing in middleware and the database market. So, we were able to educate a lot more people on the kind of broader, bigger Oracle that perhaps they didn?t know about.

Has software purchasing within big companies loosened up a bit in the last six months, or a year or so? Is there still a long sales cycle involved with enterprise software?
Phillips: It's still a test market, it's still very competitive, and customers are just much smarter buyers than they were years ago. There's no getting around that, and I don't think that's going to change, but I will say that their pattern of buying has changed in a sense that they want to buy from large companies. They're reducing the number of suppliers, and they're going to select a stack to build around and plan their architecture around, and have gotten out of this "best of breed" mentality. They see what's happening in the industry, and industry is consolidating, and smaller companies are having a tough time.

So, while the pie is slowly expanding and we can always use more, the bigger driver right now are that the shifts within the pie favor us.  

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who says oracle finished

Sir,
Yes I agree with Mr.Charles Phillips that Oracle
hasn't finished, not only that its market is hiking.

Rupa