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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (8705)	10/26/1998 6:00:00 PM
From: Jesus A. Castillo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

Michelle, There are two issues here. One is the installed base. You said that Oracle Apps customers (its installed base) had been moving off of Oracle Apps to other vendor's solutions. I have not see that happening. Second issue is Oracle's ability to win new deals when competing with the likes of SAP, Peoplesoft, Baan, etc. Here I agree that Oracle has been having a tough time in the last year compared to the previous two to three years. However, it has still increased the total installed base; perhaps not as rapidly as SAP/Peoplesoft since it has been losing more than winning in head to head competition (but not losing all deals mind you). I'd bet that Oracle is on more short lists than not. So, my first point is that I don't think there has been much erosion of the installed base. Furthermore, the installed base should contribute to additional license sales as customers expand their deployment of the applications. And the installed base should also provide additional consulting revenue. My second point is that I think that Oracle is getting itself in better shape to win a greater percentage of the Apps deals for which it competes. This is due to (albeit slowly) improving salesforce focus on solutions and product/functionality improvements. I think that we are in the early stages of this and we won't get a sense of "reality" until the current quarter's numbers are reported in December. I'm betting that we will see early indications of improvement and this will set the stage for strong Q3 and Q4 results (database, apps and services). My cynicism flares when I suspect that a small sample size is being used to extrapolate. We all have anecdotes on the positive and negative side; but anecdotes generally are not common/widespread enough to properly describe a real trend. Regardless, I am interested in trying to uncover the "truth" through putting together the various pieces of the puzzle contributed by everyone here and through other forums. Best regards, Jesse