Not many companies have databases that could stand up to Oracle’s testing processes, Larry Ellison told OpenWorld attendees.
Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco is winding down, and the fifth richest American took some questions from the 35,000 assembled for the gathering. InformationWeek reported that future applications developed for Project Fusion could be certified with IBM’s DB2.
Microsoft’s SQL Server would be a candidate as well, but not open-source favorites like MySQL or PostGreSQL. “It’s a nontrivial process to supply certification. IBM is much better equipped to go through it. I’m not sure I can say that for these other databases,” he said to InformationWeek.
He responded to a question about technical support, and expressed surprise that a daytime caller in the US kept getting routed to a call center in India. Oracle does maintain a couple of call centers in the US, but call centers routinely reroute overflow calls when possible to other call centers.
He also dismissed one-time takeover target BEA from the potential list of future Oracle acquisitions, citing a more hostile structure in place at BEA to prevent that from happening. SalesForce.com, now a direct competitor with Oracle in the CRM space, isn’t a takeover target either. “I’d like to see my investment in them go to zero,” Mr. Ellison said; he was an early backer of SalesForce.
As to the issue of his professional relationship with Tom Siebel, whose company Oracle just bought, Mr. Ellison put aside a few years of contentious comments by saying they were “all water under the bridge now,” the report noted.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
