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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (17701)	12/19/2002 9:19:44 AM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19079

8:29AM Oracle: Summit Analytics reiterates Sell rating, $7 target (ORCL): Summit Analytics reiterates their Sell rating and $7 price target on ORCL; although co beat consensus ests last night, firm notes that deferred revs fell sharply for the first time in a year, and if you back out the $265 mln of reduced deferreds from sales, ORCL would have posted $0.05 and been light by $270 mln on the top line; also, channel checks indicate that calendar Q4 is shaping up to be a difficult one, and firm expects the co's "unsustainable" valuation to depreciate to trade in-line with its peer group. finance.yahoo.com

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (17701)	12/19/2002 9:21:52 AM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

There are a couple of points in the last few posts to respond to... Lizzie's surprise that there is no "cost" to upgrade to 11i is an example of how so many people fail to understand the differences between the business practices of Oracle and other software companies (like Microsoft). When you license an Oracle software product, you pay a ONE-TIME license fee. If you choose (and anyone who doesn't is a fool) to purchase a support agreement, which will probably run about 20% of the license cost, annually, not only are you purchasing UNLIMITED technical support, but you are also entitled to ALL UPGRADES to the product "for free". Oracle has NEVER charged customers with support agreements for version upgrades. In fact, if they discontinue a product and replace it with a new one (replacing Oracle Web Server with 9iAS, for example), your support agreement generally gets you the new software product for free. I have one client that was running web-deployed Oracle Reports using the Oracle Developer Server and Oracle Web Server. Since Developer Server was discontinued and the functionality moved to 9iAS, they made one phone call and converted the Developer Server/Web Server licenses to 9iAS Enterprise Edition. For free! Now just to prove myself wrong, Oracle has recently introduced fixed-term licensing as an alternative to the perpetual license we're all accustomed to. Now you can purchase, for example, a 4-year license for a product. I'm not sure how that works, or why you would want to do it, but it's out there. I'm glad that Hardly's golf buddy is enthusiastic about the app server business at Oracle, but from the user side, I'm getting the feeling that the latest release, 9iAS R2 is a huge mistake. I have yet to hear anyone who was able to easily install the product and people hate the architecture. With this new release (technobabble follows...) you are required to install Oracle's LDAP server...and you need to store the server's repository in an Oracle9i database...and that database instance needs to be separate from your other database instances...and there are restrictions on where all of the products can be installed since they don't all play nicely on the same box...and if you already have LDAP from another vendor, it doesn't matter, you can't use it with 9iAS...and so on, and so on. I have not spoken to anybody who is happy about 9iAS R2. All of the happy folks must work for Oracle... -Michael

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (17701)	12/19/2002 1:20:25 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

I have noticed that for all the crowing that IBM does about Websphere, BEA is hanging in there just fine. Admittedly I have heard of a few high profile customers that dumped BEA for websphere because IBM made them a bundled offer they couldn't refuse (Gap was one site) - but then BEA has plenty of data points where they are holding their own too. And imo BEAS is the strongest company in software too. What this says to me is the race isn't won in the app server biz and Oracle owning the engine has a strong advantage. We know ecommerce (amazon etc.) is blowing out this season with growth rates just like the bubble. So plenty of demand for ecommerce software going forward. I have to say, Oracle's statements and numbers regarding the weak apps revenue is inconsistent with my anecdotal evidence. Of course I am in SV and oracle apps dominate here, just by virtue of the fact that Oracle is close proximity wise. What I am seeing is Oracle CRM taking shops that formerly would have gone Siebel... brcd is an Oracle CRM shop and a new networking startup (high profile) with a management team from rbak who had sebl before chose Oracle ERP+ Oracle CRM this time around. To me, it seems like oracle apps are GAINING share. Again maybe its a local thing. I see a bunch of analysts coming out with "fully valued" calls that are putting a lid on gains in stock today. Actually these "fully valued" and sell calls are getting somewhat tiring. I have a networking stock (cien) and there were a ton of sell calls the day before earnings. This is because the analysts weren't sure about the numbers so they just said sell. The numbers were good and cien rallied 22%. One analyst from soundview had a buy on the stock and stayed by his prediction. Personally I don't want trading advice from analysts which is what all these constant switching of recs really are. They flip around so much they are useless. You can't even use the old -buy when the analysts say sell- indicator anymore because they switch from buy to sell twice in a 2 week period. Lizzie