Oracle pledges to kick up rivalry with IBM

REDWOOD SHORES: Oracle Corp is readying a marketing counterstrike against

International Business Machines Corp which has been fighting to grab market

share in Oracle's key database business, executives said on Wednesday.

"We haven't had a good technology fight in the last few years. We're

kind of relishing this," said Jeff Henley, Oracle's Chief Financial Officer

said Wednesday during meeting with analysts at the No 2 software maker's

headquarters. Henley admitted that Oracle did not respond quickly enough to

IBM's recent marketing campaign that harped on Oracle's high prices for its

database software.

Industry analysts agreed that Oracle's database cost more than IBM's

mid-market DB2 offering. Nevertheless, analysts have been nearly unanimous in

saying that Oracle's database - a virtual standard in the high-end market -

possesses stronger functionality.

Oracle punched back earlier this month by dropping the price on its new 9i

database, which Henley called Oracle's most important new release since Version

7 in the early 1990s. Now the company will launch a marketing campaign stressing

the performance of its database software and charging in one ad that when IBM

wanted to demonstrate its fastest computer it chose to run with Oracle's

software.

"IBM started it. We are going to finish it," said George Roberts,

Oracle's executive vice president of North American sales told analysts. "I

don't think we're a peacetime company. We're a wartime company. We like to

fight." Oracle derives about 75 per cent of its annual revenues from its

database business.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.