Oracle President Sees Less as More

When you talk about industry applications, it's a bunch of niche players or [applications built] in-house. It's wide open. Collectively, those customers are spending way more on [home-grown systems] than they are on ERP [enterprise resource planning]. We want to harness four or five big industries with packaged applications and get telecom companies and banking companies to quit building their own systems. We'll be moving into industries we are already strong in.

Such as?

Banking will be huge for us; they spend $30 billion a year on IT and a lot of that is building stuff, and a lot of them are tired of doing it. Others are telecom, the public sector, health care, high tech and retail.

Sounds like there won't be a deal the size of PeopleSoft or Siebel in the foreseeable future.

The larger deals are probably behind us. I won't rule anything out down the road, but for the most part what's left to be bought for our strategy in these areas are smaller companies. That's the opportunity; we can go in and take pieces of technology and quickly become a big player in those areas.

If investors were trying to read your mind and say "Where can I find a company that could be an acquisition target for Oracle?" what sectors would you tell them to look at?

Well, I'm not sure I want investors reading my mind. We are targeting the industries I've talked about and will execute from there.

Would Retek be a good model to look at?

Yes. Retek worked well for us. We bought something where they had best-of-breed technology, and -- this is key -- they had the people who had the domain expertise and knew the retail industry well.

How does open source fit into that strategy?

It's just another choice for customers. Some prefer it, but we view it as a positive for Oracle. Open source lets people quickly learn about various technologies and get the skill sets they need. If they are serious about deploying and using those applications they'll want a commercial-grade product, they'll want global support, all the things you can't get from open source. Then they come to Oracle. It's sending us new customers and educating people we probably couldn't reach on our own. Having more people learn about Internet standards and Java and not Microsoft(MSFT Quote) is good for us.