Larry Ellison, Oracle

Main pitch:

What it means: In his latest assault on Microsoft, Ellison touts the clustering capabilities of his company's flagship Oracle 9i database and its apps. But the clustering he's talking up these days are not high-powered, mega-servers, but rather low-cost Intel boxes running Linux. That's Oracle's strategy for maintaining market share moving forward? It's one of them. Ellison adds that Oracle's best shot at growth is at targeting small and midsize businesses. Toward that end, Oracle is beefing up its outsourcing and hosting business and once again trying to take on Microsoft's Exchange server with new collaboration tools.

VARBusiness' View: Ellison is coming to grips that companies won't plunk down millions of dollars on buckets of software. Oracle, like many of its competitors, is moving to subscription-based licensing models. Ellison recently said Oracle gets 20 percent of all contracts through subscriptions. While he remains obsessed with obliterating Microsoft, he seems to finally realize that IBM is his real problem. But much of what he's touting is the same old stuff. How many times has Ellison pitched its database to run files and e-mail? Meanwhile, Oracle saw its annual revenue decline for the first time in its history. No wonder its stock is down more than 50 percent in the past year; in contrast, Microsoft's stock is down only 25 percent. That's one number even Larry's having a hard time spinning in a positive light. For all its power, however, Oracle has yet to make headway trying to get smaller companies to see its core value. Sometimes power can overwhelm, Oracle should take note.