IMS Global: Perhaps a good place to begin is at the beginning. What would you like people to know about Oracle?

CB: We could talk about a lot of things there. I think the reason a lot of us are at Oracle today is its position in the overall software marketplace. It's about what's happening in technology, not just in Education, but also across a variety of industries. Technology is consolidating for what I call typical industry consolidation reasons. You can go back and look at any number of industries and determine why they consolidated. In the technology industry, scale plays a huge role in your effectiveness with regard to your profit objective as well as serving your customers in a global context. Being at Oracle and where Oracle is headed is really driving that scale, both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as making investments in a number of verticals. We are in this for the long haul. This is a company that is positioning itself to be around for the long term and has selected a number of key industries to focus on in order to accomplish that objective.

IMS Global: Considering what is taking place in the market today, do you envision a lot of Oracle's fundamental applications merging?

CB: First, you have to define merge. We have stated that our direction in terms of future applications is in Project Fusion. A lot of people confuse that immediately and assume there are terminal releases for products such as Siebel and PeopleSoft. Fusion really represents an evolutionary aspect of the progression of our applications. It isn't one or the other of any existing product line. It really is a blending of all those product lines. And we have examples today where that blending is happening in both the context of future releases, but also in terms of what we're releasing today. A prime example of that: we recently shipped our PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions and Human Capital Management 9.0 releases. Those were the last releases in the chain of PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, and they have functionality like Oracle XML Publisher built in, so we're already seeing a blending-or fusing-of the various product lines. Going forward, my team's job is to do the cross-product comparisons. We identify the things that our various product lines, including Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel do really well and then decide to pull those pieces forward into what we want the next application set to look like. At the functional level, you'll see a real design cross compare. We're taking the best of what those companies did; they each had their specializations; they each served different industries and certain products well, and the evolution of the application set will be able to showcase and highlight all of those advantages.

One more example of what happens when you do this sort of consolidation, Oracle EBS Release 12, which will be available in 2007, went through pretty significant front-end user interface redesign predicated on industry leading and award-winning designs from PeopleSoft and Siebel. So what you're seeing, it's not a one-way street, right? We're doing what you would expect a good organization to do, which is to take the best of the best and move the needle on all fronts.

IMS Global: Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in December 2004. Has the assimilation met your expectations? How is the acquisition going?

CB: Well, you wouldn't see the positive things happening with the product line or you wouldn't see our stock price or earning announcements where they are if things were going poorly. Certainly, you're talking about companies that had very different cultures, very different DNA. In sum total, I would say the assimilation has gone extremely well. The market has spoken about that. The analysts speak about that.

What I haven't mentioned yet is Oracle's `Applications Unlimited' strategy, in which we have committed to enhance JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications on an on-going basis, beyond the delivery of the first Fusion applications in 2008. So, PeopleSoft, for the foreseeable future and certainly in a career timeline context, will live and breathe at Oracle. I think there is a lot of credit to be given to the executive team for the post-merger integration. They made a great call that for large companies such as PeopleSoft and Siebel, you don't just assimilate them. And in the same way, as you evolve your products and move them forward as your customers want you to do, you also don't neglect your installed base. You don't leave them on a ledge or put them in a forced march in another direction. If you think about the historical trends here, what we're doing is not any different from the architectural evolution from Mainframe to Client-Server to the Internet. Only this time we're not just doing it as an organic process. We're doing it with acquired customer bases and existing product lines.

In that context, the Applications Unlimited strategy says, `we want to give our customers five- to 10-year windows in which they will be able to make decisions about when and how they move to the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). We didn't do that in the PeopleSoft context. We went from 7.6 to 8.0, and from there to later generations of 8. If you wanted to stay technically current, you had to move. What we're saying now is SOA is where we're headed; we are putting a huge amount of R&D into this. The whole industry is moving down this SOA path. The idea is to put the architecture in a mode where you can have a much more component driven model. That way, you can pick and choose what you want to plug in, much the way we do with PC's and Mac's.

IMS Global: What is Academic Enterprise?

CB: The Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) is a philosophy, a vision. Today, we have a very mature product set. In education, we have a large installed base of more than 1,000 customers in over 30 countries. What do we do well? We serve the back office. With our Student Administration version 9 release, I will go on record as saying that we have established a new benchmark in the industry. We focus on self-service. We focus on advisement. It's a really powerful, feature-rich release. What we don't do, and ERP vendors have not done, by and large, is address the teaching and learning needs of the customer. Of course, folks will point out that is what a course management system (CMS) does. My argument is that that is only a piece of the puzzle. A CMS today, if you look at its product life cycle, is basically moving into a phase of commoditization. What the CMS providers deliver is in a collaborative context, but the arena that they've not yet reached into is learning outcomes. They don't really serve the deans and what the deans need from day to day. They don't serve the needs of faculty-researchers. We do in the context of grants management, but there are a lot of other things you can do ostensibly that could support those business processes. One example would be regarding the accreditation process. Institutions I talk with today, they tell us the process is very long and painful. Once you decide to do it, you clear out a classroom, you go to the warehouse and you bring in cardboard box after cardboard box. Fifteen months and untold person hours later, you fill out an extremely long report and submit it and cross your fingers. It strikes me that there's a lot of room there to save institutions millions of dollars by finding ways to support the accreditation process. You can do that through things like content and archiving for things like work products, by streamlining some of the analytics capture and management around the use of classes, learning outcomes, and instructional metrics.

The AEI is a vision or philosophy to move into that part of the core mission of education. But we feel we have to start by solving the integration conundrum. One of the things the industry has been talking about since the mid-1990s is: how do we make our student administration products speak to our course delivery side of the house? We need to have a better view of what's going on at the student level. We need a little more control in the value chain. Our mission isn't to go re-create a CMS market. What we do want to do, as we move into this space, is have a little bit more control over our development environment, what we're doing, and less reliance on outside parties.

If I did a poll of the 2,800 or so institutions that have standardized on a CMS and asked them how many have a real-time, IMS-based integration model between their student system and their CMS, very few would raise their hands. When I talk with CIOs, they are frustrated. And it is not just their course systems. It's their application topology. When you have staff who are dedicated full-time to managing batch update and data integrity and security between the student system, the library system, course management system, and so on, we've got to help our customers move beyond that.