Oracle President Sees Less as More

Can you tell us anything about the M&A discussion that many people believed took place between JBoss and Oracle?

No, I can't talk about that.

Growth in Oracle's core database business seems to have slowed down in the last few quarters. Is this a worrisome trend?

It's actually not that much slower if you adjust for currency. We had a 9-percentage-point hit in Europe from currency. Nothing we can do about it. I think it's a business that in any given quarter it will bound around some, but the growth is there. We are gaining market share in units because we have new low-end products we didn't have two years ago. The unit volume is even faster than the dollar growth and those turn in to big deals later once you seed the customer and they start using your technology.

The core business has oscillated in a range, but there is no trend line that shows we are slowing down. You should look at this on a trailing 12-month basis and if you do, our results have been consistent.

Will Oracle hire a new CFO or will [co-President] Safra Catz continue in that role?

We don't have a search on; for the foreseeable future we have a CFO and that's been working out well.

[CEO] Larry Ellison is a relatively young and apparently healthy man, but succession is an important issue for any large, public company. What is Oracle doing about this?

That is the board's purview, of course. There's no expectation of him leaving any time soon. He's engaged in the business aggressively day to day. It's not something I wake up and worry about every morning.

Does the increasing importance of recurring subscription revenue (as opposed to license revenue) mean investors should view software companies differently? Is there an over-emphasis on license revenue?

The business has changed -- the analysts haven't. People can't analyze the business the same way they did 10 years ago when license was 70% of the revenue stream. It was just under 50% in the last quarter because the industry has evolved. Investors are also missing what it means to have a certain number of customers. In our industry, unlike selling widgets, customers stay for decades ... that gives us a steady revenue stream, plus cross-sell and upsell opportunities. The value of that is hard to calculate, but it is much larger than people think it is.