Ellison Forswears Customer Upgrade Coercion - ' Redoubling on' (
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Ellison also rejected any predictions that Oracle might "kill off" the Siebel CRM OnDemand product after it closes its acquisition of Siebel Systems.
"We want to increase our presence in the on-demand business. We think on-demand is a very important service offering going forward," he said.
"We are going to redouble our efforts in the on-demand business" because the company believes that is what many customers want and because it is very conscious of the competitive challenge posed by pure-play on-demand software companies such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc., he said.
Oracle details its lifetime support policy. Click here to read more.
Its all part of the effort of giving customers another choice of how they want to buy and run business applications, he said. "You can run your entire business on-demand if you like and every flavor in between," he said.
In response to an audience question, Ellison reaffirmed his opposition to processor-based software pricing because it is difficult to verify how many processors or multicore processors a company is actually running.
Instead, he prefers to offer pricing based on the total number of employees, or based on revenue with the flexibility to address annual licensing and maintenance based on whether total headcount or revenue rises or falls during the period, he said.
Open standards, SOA (service-oriented architecture) and security will all be Oracles technology focus for the next two years, Ellison said.
Using open standards and SOA will be the key to enabling customers to choose whether they want to run applications with Oracle or IBM middleware or with different vendors Java tools, Ellison said.
"All of our Fusion applications are going to be built with SOA," he said, to make it easy for customers to use the components and applications that work best for them. "You should be able to unplug our Java container and plug in somebody elses," he said.
Security will continue to be a prime focus for Oracle because the security risks are increasing and will only continue to increase, he said.
One of the key questions for Oracle is whether it should even give customers the option of switching off data encryption when they do database backups, Ellison said. It may be best to assume that every data backup must be encrypted to reduce the chances that customer data will be compromised when storage tapes or removable disk drives are lost in transit, he said.
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