Oracle make solid and somewhat dull progress

Now that Oracle has completed its shopping spree, gobbling up Peplesoft, Siebel etc, the news coming out of them is distinctly boring. But then it would be. Oracle has matured as a company.

In their latest quarter sales of new licences for Oracle’s database and middleware products climbed 5% to $785m, an acceleration from the 1% seen in the preceding three months, but still below the 8% or so most analysts had expected. Oracle had blamed the weakness in its core business on price competition from Microsoft, which has launched a new version of its own database software.

Oracle, like SAP will increasingly behave like a utility. Organic growth will be slow and steady and the focus will increasingly be on operational excellence and cost containment. Growth will come from M&A once they get over their current indigestion.

Competition will remain the usual suspects of SAP, Microsoft and IBM. The potential sparkle in the space could prove the disruptive salesforce.com. If they really shine all bets are off and things could get interesting again. Until then expect Oracle to become extremely predictable. Yawn.

The maturisation of the corporate software industry is well and truly under way. Thank goodness we have consumer technology, the internet and wireless to keep us on our toes going forwards.