Oracle Tops Estimates, Execs Come Out Swinging - Page 2

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Also during today's call, Phillips said that Oracle's Fusion middleware beat IBM WebSphere for several key customers, including Visa, and added that the company's business intelligence product has seen several wins over IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Cognos.

In the financial vertical, he added, Oracle is diversifying outside the United State, and with the win of the National Bank of Egypt, it now has 70 percent of the Egyptian banking market.

"Verticals like banking are doing well as SAP customers are returning to Oracle," he said.

With Sun, Oracle expects to complete the stack

Oracle executives said they would not talk about the pending acquisition of Sun -- but proceeded to drop broad hints about Oracle's strategy for Sun, especially in hardware.

"Our customers know we'll make it all work together at the factory," Phillips said during today's call. "They're excited, if Exadata is any indication of the power of hardware and software integration."

Ellison added that Exadata "ran about 100 times faster in some cases than in a standard Oracle environment."

"With Exadata, we're looking for a 10, 15, 100 times performance improvement," he said. "We've thrown more CPUs in huge numbers, InfiniBand , and large memory caches at the problem. We're looking for orders of magnitude improvements like flash memory."

Ellison also said that the company wants to build a fully integrated product.

"Our goal is to deliver a complete stack, starting with the VM and OS," he said during the call. "With Xen, the Linux operating system, and Oracle's database, middleware, and applications, we will deliver a complete and integrated stack -- and with the Sun acquisition, we'll go down into the hardware."

The company believes that those that offer integrated products have an advantage. "Cost pressures and increasing complexity are acting as a catalyst, causing customers to introduce integrated products in place of bespoke applications," Phillips said.

Aiming to be No. 1

Ellison even talked trash in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market, taking some shots at rival Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM).

"Salesforce is only a $1 billion company," he said. "We're the second-largest provider of on-demand services and we offer a model that Salesforce does not offer. We offer single tenancy in your datacenter where we provide upgrade services and administer the application. It's a significant differentiator with Salesforce and when we've gone up against them, we've won virtually every one."

"We think we can be the No. 1 application company, the No. 1 on-premises software company, and the No. 1 on-demand company," he added. "That's our goal. Our Fusion applications are code-complete and all are on-demand ready. They're available on-premises but also designed from the ground up to be SaaS."

Oracle's next major product launch is next week, according to Phillips, who said the company will launch Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g in Washington, D.C. and several other cities. The product is currently in previews.

Update adds comments from the earnings call.