I don't know about the business side, but one of golf buddies works on the app server at ORCL, and he's been very happy about the way things are going the last few times I've seen him. It's been quite a while since he made it out to play (at least 3 months), so I sent him some email last week asking how things were going, and he's still quite happy about it. Knowing this guy, I would say that the only thing that you can be sure of from his reaction is that ORCL has a solid product -- I'm not sure what he knows about revenue. He did say that the product was a solid 3rd in number of users behind BEAS and IBM, but since they were giving an early version away, I don't know how many users aren't paying for it.
I have one other technical data point. My brother knows about this stuff, and he got the free version and played with it, and he was very impressed. He said that it was very good, and he thought that the previous ORCL offerings were beneath contempt, so he was surprised at how fast it improved. He was also impressed by the features that were, at the time, upcoming for 9iAS. I doubt that he's had time to look at it the real product, though.
So, good product, unknown revenue. I have to think that ORCL will be able to figure out how to sell a good product... |
