Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During latest quarterly results)

Larry Ellison on Oracle Middleware (During the recent Quarterly results of Oracle on Thursday 20th Sept 2007)

In Middleware, while Oracle is not number one like we are in Database, we are by far the fastest growing Middleware company. As Safra pointed out, our growth in software was the fastest it's been in a decade and that was really led by our Middleware group, whose growth was just spectacular. It looks like the Middleware business is coming down to the same big three players, but in exactly the opposite order.



With Microsoft’s middleware, a lot of it is embedded in Windows. Microsoft is the number one player. IBM is the number two player and Oracle is the number three player in middleware. But we have passed all the other niche players. We have really separated ourselves from the niche players. We're almost twice as large as BEA right now. BEA is shrinking in terms of new license sales.



So, it's come down to the same big three, but we're growing dramatically faster than our competitors and our target really is to beat IBM because it's very difficult to measure the size of Microsoft's middleware business because so much of it is embedded in Windows.



Also, as I said before, Microsoft is proprietary technology while IBM and Oracle both have a strategy to deliver middleware based on industry standards. According to our current growth rate, if we maintain our trajectory and IBM maintains their trajectory, we could pass IBM as early as the end of this year or certainly next year, to become the number two player in middleware. So that's very, very exciting.