Oracle 2006 Annual Report Download - page 13

Table of Contents
In the sale of middleware products, our offerings include business intelligence, application integration,
business process management (BPM), service oriented architecture, portal, J2EE application server,
development tools and identity management software. Our ability to offer a full range of rich functionality in
a standards-based, open architecture has been a key competitive differentiator. Our competitors include IBM,
Microsoft, BEA Systems, Inc., SAP AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Sybase and open source vendors such as
Red Hat (JBoss), Apache Geronimo and ObjectWeb, as well as other competitors in each element of our
packaged functions. Business intelligence competitors include Actuate Corporation, Business Objects S.A.,
Cognos Incorporated, MicroStrategy, Inc., SAS Institute, TIBCO Software, Inc. (Spotfire), open source
vendors Netezza Corporation, and others. Application server competitors include Borland Software
Corporation, Fujitsu Software Corporation, Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd., Adobe Systems
Incorporated and others. Enterprise Application Integration competitors include Software AG (webMethods),
TIBCO, IONA Technologies PLC, Sonic Software Corporation, Sun Microsystems and others. BPM
competitors include Lombardi Software, Inc., Savvion, Inc., Pegasystems Inc. and others. Enterprise portal
vendors include Vignette Corporation, Novell, Inc., Fujitsu, and others. Identity management vendors include
IBM, CA, Inc., Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard Company, among others. Open source vendors Red
Hat and Novell are also increasingly bundling middleware functionality with their respective Linux
distributions. Our middleware solutions have experienced rapid growth in recent years relative to our
competitors. In the sale of collaboration products, we compete primarily with Microsoft (Exchange/Outlook),
IBM (Domino/Notes), Novell (Groupwise) and Cisco Systems, Inc. (WebEx). In addition, we compete in the
related content management markets with EMC Corporation (Documentum), IBM (FileNet), Percussion
Software, Inc. and Vignette, among others.
In the sale of development tools, ease of use, standards-compliance and the level of abstraction (automated
code generation) are key competitive differentiators. We compete against IBM (WebSphere Studio),
Microsoft 8 (VisualStudio.NET), Sun Microsystems (Sun Studio), Sybase (PowerBuilder) and others,
including Eclipse Foundation, Inc. (Eclipse), an open source vendor. The success of our development tools is
closely related to the relative popularity of our platform (database and middleware) compared to our
competitors, as well as the larger competition between Java and Microsoft’s .NET.
The sale of applications software, in particular, is changing rapidly due to the development and deployment of
service oriented architectures and web services, application integration middleware as well as “software as a
service” offerings, such as those from salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies Inc. in CRM applications.
As a result of our acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel, we presently offer several product lines, which are
suited for different needs of customers in different industries. We compete against SAP, Lawson Software,
Inc., Infor Global Solutions GmbH (SSA Global Technologies, Extensity), Microsoft Dynamics (Great Plains,
Solomon, Axapta, Navision), Sage, Inc. and many other application providers. These include numerous point
solution providers such as Epicor Software Corporation (accounting), SunGard Data Systems Inc. (treasury),
Kronos Incorporated (time and attendance), Taleo Corporation (recruitment), Callidus Software Inc.
(compensation), Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (HR, payroll and business process outsourcing), Ariba, Inc.
(procurement), i2 Technologies, Inc. (supply chain management), IBM (MRO Software) (enterprise asset
management), DSCI Corporation (logistics), Broadvision, Inc. (marketing), Kana Software, Inc. (analytics),
salesforce.com (sales force automation) and Amdocs Limited (customer service). In addition, we compete
with numerous specialized applications providers focused in specific vertical industries, such as financial
services, retail and telecommunications. SAP is a major competitor in every industry vertical. Specialized
industry vertical solutions such as retail and banking are also influenced heavily by the presence of
customized solutions and in-house development.
With SOA, our packaged applications also compete with custom solutions either developed in-house or by
large systems integrators such as Accenture Ltd. or IBM Global Services. Our pre-packaged applications also
compete against business process outsourcers including ADP, Fidelity Investments, Ceridian Corporation,
Hewitt-Cyborg Limited and others. Our application products are architected around a single database model,
which we believe is a key differentiator between our most significant competitors and us.
In the sale of operating systems, we introduced a support and service offering for Red Hat’s open source
Linux operating system in fiscal 2007. This puts us in direct competition with Red Hat, Novell, Canonical
Ltd. (Ubuntu) and others in the sale of support for the Linux operating system; with IBM, Sun, H-P and
others in the sale of Unix operating systems; and with Microsoft in the sale of Windows server operating
systems.
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Source: ORACLE CORP, 10-K, June 29, 2007 Powered by Morningstar® Document Research℠