January 26, 2005

As it usually does this time of year, and as part of its semiannual analysts' day, Oracle today outlined a range of plans for 2005 and beyond, from its integration of its newly acquired PeopleSoft technology, to Oracle's new penetration of the market for collaboration enterprise software.

The event was preceded by the company's announcement earlier Wednesday that it expects to exceed analysts' expectations for earnings for fiscal 2006--a move that at least one analyst said demonstrates strength from its recent $10.3 billion acquisition of former rival PeopleSoft.

"We bought PeopleSoft to cement our position in several areas. We are now the No. 1 applications provider in North America," Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive, said during the analyst conference. "Applications companies have different strengths in different industries and geographies. We would never dream of competing against SAP in the energy or automobile industries...we're not going to bang our heads competing with them in Germany."

Ellison noted that instead, Oracle will focus its efforts on capturing the top position in markets where it is now the second leading player and spend resources in areas where it is already the market leader.

Ellison said that although the industry may feel that the database market is slow-growing and saturated, he feels there is still a significant amount of growth potential left in the industry and that it's actually undergoing a rebirth with grid computing, which provides the illusion of a mainframe database computer via clustering computers. In fact, he said, Oracle is expecting to get a "new beginning" from its grid computing strategy.

"We are in the beginning days of database grids," Ellison said. "We have a huge advantage over our competitors. The largest number of servers to run Microsoft is one. The largest number of servers to run IBM is one."

Oracle's top dog also discussed the plans for propelling its applications server business to the No. 1 spot, possibly through an acquisition, as well as entering the market for collaboration software.

Article by: Dawn Kawamoto,
Source: C-Net News