You can't drive your own agenda, ... Customers drive your agenda for you. Customers cannot be disrupted, period. Oracle is a professional, ethical, large company. They're not going to disrupt any of our customers.

Customers are still setting the technology agenda. Not just you, our customers, but your customers as well. What more and more are telling you is what kind of services they need, and how and when they want those services delivered to them. And in fact, that is just the beginning

the people in the company who have mortgages to pay are taken care of. Oracle is sending all the right signals.

I think this puts a lot of competitive pressure in the marketplace. The first entrant in a market isn't necessarily the ultimate winner. Marc may have created awareness for an interesting market opportunity, but I don't believe this is game over. It has been our intent and will continue to be our intent to take all of our products and services and deliver them in an on-demand form factor.

Siebel CRM OnDemand was built on Siebel 7.5.2, and the fact is that that product line runs on any database and any application server. We created a partnership with IBM and we chose for that partnership, for obvious reasons, to run it on WebSphere and DB2. There is no technical linkage. We can make a different decision going forward if we choose.

An SOA is a collection of these services communicating with each other, either through simple passage of data or a coordinated effort to do a task. To get them to communicate, you need Web services. We used to buy a stereo system as a single integrated unit, all hardwired together--the speakers, the receiver, the tuner, and the turntable. Some stereos had a better receiver, while some had a better turntable. One day somebody figured, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could mix and match components?' Now the bits and pieces work together, connected by standardized wiring.