I think, given the skill set that we have, we're not limited, we don't have to focus on one size deal or the other. I do think we'll be opportunistic when price makes sense. Obviously we have an ongoing process; we're reviewing a lot of those opportunities, but nothing has really changed, and we don't have to limit ourselves.
Do you feel like you've digested the PeopleSoft acquisition completely?
Phillips: I think that we've digested it. I mean, we didn't have one of
these plans where we evaluate everything for nine months and slowly start to
make changes. We made the changes in the first 30 days. And people are again
still asking how we did that, so I think the speed served us as well, because it
gave clarity to customers. I think it gave clarity to employees too. We're able
to get out in front of the customers quickly and not be bogged down in internal
meetings.
So, that was done in the first 30 days, and then the last remaining infrastructure pieces on the back end of the IT stuff was done a couple of months ago. So, there's not anything remaining. We're operating as a single company and moving forward.
Do you see any need to kind of realignment along vertical lines, and are
you forced to sell slightly differently than you have in the past?
Phillips: We're doing that as we get deeper into selected verticals. So
we're not doing a wholesale reorganization the way IBM did. We don't need to do
that, and that's disruptive. But certainly, as we build our products and
verticals, or make acquisitions like Retek, we create organizations around them.
Retek has been run as the Oracle retail business unit, and that's a vertical business unit within Oracle globally. We'll do more of that, but build it incrementally over time. It doesn't make sense to do that until you have more content in any particular industry.
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?
Phillips: 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.
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?
Phillips: 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?
Phillips: 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 favor us.
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