Yoop, the issues with 11i are short to medium term in nature, but Larry has to succeed. The money will come from apps in the future, not the data base engine. The database is becoming more and more a commodity, though his application development tools are pretty hot and profitable for now.
On the solutions side he is competing against all of the ERP, financial software, HR software, project mgt software, inventory control software, B2B software companies.
What Larry has promised is a totally integrated set of solutions to all of an enterprises resource management needs, all running in a secure web-based environment. He is cobbling together a whole bunch of apps that were not written to be integrated and converting to web-enabled apps at the same time.
Its a tall order, and it is taking a whole lot more time than anyone expected. But it is getting done. It is getting done because that is all that Larry has been concerned about, operationally, for a few years now. It's his number one thing.
He has been in trouble on this, imo, for a while, but it has not been evident, generally. Now he is setting high expectations on Wall St. so he has to get his folks to produce the working products, sell them, and (this is the hard part) create reference accounts. |
