How do you expect that SAP might approach that challenge?
[SAP] says "we are going to get your services-based architecture, give you all this new functionality, all this new architecture, but we are not going to change anything." You can't have it both ways. Either they're going to do the same thing that we are doing or they're going to say, "We are not going to change anything, we are going to stay stuck with the architecture of the last decade" — and they can't say that.
So both things cannot be true and customers are figuring that out as they listen to SAP talk about services, architectures and components. They have thousands of people working on changing the architecture. So the only questions are: Who has been more transparent about it? Who has the resources to get there? Who has built infrastructure like this before? On all those counts, we come out way ahead. I think this whole discussion around services is a middleware-based discussion.
So it comes down to a debate over who has the best applications middleware strategy?
Our applications server in middleware strategy is beyond debate the best in the industry... I think the whole discussion favours our strength: the fact that people are talking about architecture again underneath applications. Once we go through that with customers, we find that they are pretty excited about where we are leading them.
Are you saying that customers are buying with the knowledge that in the relatively near future, they will need to change the architecture under their applications?
They're buying with the knowledge that the architecture will evolve in an evolutionary way over time toward something they think is pretty exciting. We have told them the pace at which it will evolve, and what exactly it will evolve into.
SAP is saying at the same time theirs won't evolve, but maybe it will, and that they are going to get into same endpoint as Oracle is describing — but that nothing will change. It's just not credible.
So customers understand that there will be significant changes that they need to make to keep up?
We get them to the next generation. That has been part of the strength of Oracle. That's why we have so many customers. We have been through many generations of technology. These will be upgrades, not migrations, and once we explain how we plan to do it and that we have done it before and give them examples, [customers] say "OK".
We have given a guarantee that on the existing architectures that customers are running, if they don't want to move at all, don't do that and you know that you can stay where you are until 2013, at least. We're telling them you don't have to upgrade, so there is no downside, it's all upside.
