Oracle Says Market's Recovering But SAP's Unraveling

Oracle's conference call Thursday with financial analysts offered great insights on how its top three executives view their business and the overall IT market, their customers' spending habits, Oracle's products, and its competitors (see second half of headline). Here are 10 such comments you won't want to miss.These comments are taken from my transcription of the archived audio recording of the Oracle webcast analysts call, which is available through Dec. 28.

1) "Once again, we grew faster than SAP in every region around the world, clearly taking market share as they have essentially come apart at the seams." --Oracle president Safra Catz

2) "We expect a full and unconditional clearance [on the Sun acquisition] from the European Commission in January." --Catz

3) "I want to emphasize that our pipelines continue to be very strong, and the close-rates I'm assuming are more-conservative than typical third-quarter close rates. . . . Obviously, definitely we are seeing customers back buying and it's extremely widespread-no giant deals of any sort but lots of very nice-sized transactions for every size of company. So we're really seeing a recovery. . . . We are clearly winning at the expense of others but we also see the environment significantly improving." --Catz

4) "Exadata is on fire-it nearly tripled in sales sequentially-the pipelines are growing week to week-we're now having some of the initial customers come back and asking for multiple systems, which is always a good sign. The main constraint we have now is just production capacity, and the field [sales force] is fighting for them in each region, so it's a red-hot product and we expect that to continue to add momentum going forward." --president Charles Phillips (and yes, Oracle has two presidents)

5) "We're also going to be building clusters of industry-standard machines and Sparc machines. And those clusters are now called private clouds-that's the more-fashionable term for clusters." -CEO Larry Ellison (For more commentary from Ellison, see today's column called Global CIO: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison On The Future Of IT)

6) "The pipelines are growing in each region and certainly the tone of the forecast calls is a little bit better than it was three months ago." --Phillips

7) "Banks had stepped back for a while but what we're seeing in the pipeline and what's already closing--in the first few weeks of the quarter, even the banks seem to be coming back. Retail had a tough time six months ago but their pipeline has come back and they closed a deal already in the first few weeks of this quarter and it was fairly sizable." --Phillips

8) "We think the Exadata business is going to be huge-by huge, billions of dollars a year in new systems sales, not including the maintenance on those businesses." --Ellison

9) "Regarding your maintenance question-software updates and support-obviously that is really our subscribers-those are our users-they're paying both for support and the right to receive new, without buying new licenses, our new products, and that's a number that's always going to go up because customers feel they're getting a fantastic value for it . . . . But maintenance for us is really who our customers are and they're renewing at record rates because they're very satisfied with our products and we're advancing so quickly right now." --Catz

10) "How big is that [integrated systems] business? We think that's what the computer business is gonna look like for large customers going forward, so we think that's billions and billions of dollars. That is our business in the future." --Ellison