IMS Global: What portion of Oracle's business is in higher education?

CB: We don't break out revenue by industry, but education is a business that the company continues to actively pursue both on the technology (database and middleware) side and the application side. As you know, we have a very strong technology presence in Higher Education-over 4,200 customers worldwide-particularly in database and growing in middleware. In the Oracle context, at the management team level, Higher Education is considered a strategic industry. What that means is it's an industry in which we want to be number one. And the reason is multi-layered. One is that (CEO) Larry Ellison is, from my understanding, a real patriot and believes education is critical to our nation's success. Also, we aren't talking about a small business. The Higher Education business at Oracle is very large. Higher education institutions need to examine the technology providers. Who is in this market and who is profitable? Who is evolving their technology and staying current? You can't do that effectively without some sort of scale. So my guess is that somewhere downstream, there will obviously be some ongoing consolidation, but by and large, the vendors serving higher education will be the very big companies you see today.

IMS Global: Oracle has taken a leadership role within IMS. What value do you believe the organization brings to the marketplace? How important are IMS standards to Oracle and to its customers?

CB: This goes back to some of what I've already said. Why standards? The value comes in getting to that level of specificity. What is a course versus a section? What's a student and what is a faculty member? The benefits of standards offered through such things as Common Cartridge are immeasurable. The lack of portability between systems is a critical pain point. The lack of flexibility in these enterprise systems is where the cost of keeping them going gets spent. It's not in the software; it's not even on the implementation. Obviously, there are peaks and valleys on those items, but a lot of the ongoing cost is personnel to manage fragile data integration. That's one piece. The second piece is: where are we evolving as an overall industry? We went from arguing over J2EE versus .NET to SOA, which made those points moot. We figured out that we've got the yellow pages to govern that and now all we need is to decide how we categorize and index the yellow pages.

Why IMS? Well, it's been a player and around for a while. With the new leadership and a new set of directives, IMS is looking at a lot of these issues as a global problem. That was the fundamental reason we decided to ante back up and get involved again. It's a non-trivial investment, because we are investing not just dollars, but people. We're hosting the next quarterly meeting at our headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. And we want to see some of the other companies like SunGard Higher Education and Blackboard play an integral role as well. They have as much at stake in being a part of this, as we do. This is about driving benefit at the industry level, not just for our customers, but also for all institutions.