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?
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 organisation, 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?
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?
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 favour us.
