Oracle announced a major shift in direction at last week's Oracle AppsWorld event. Where previously it said that firms should replace non-Oracle systems with its fully-integrated Oracle Applications suite, the database giant is now enabling its products to integrate with other enterprise systems such as those of SAP. Oracle's new Customer Data Hub, launched at the conference, is a package of products that allows companies to access data from other systems using a set of APIs and server software.

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison argued that ideally, firms should adopt the entire Oracle E-Business Suite to obtain a single source of data, but conceded that many would find this hard to do.

"I like vanilla and I still think [the entire E-Business Suite] is the lowest-cost way to get a single truth," Ellison said. "But in some large companies the amount of legacy and third-party software is so great it would take many years before they could get there."

In a similar vein, the next version of Oracle's E-Business Suite, 11i.10, which is earmarked for a summer launch, will feature a raft of interfaces as web services to enable low-cost integration.

"It's not that we are giving up on what we said before - we are in pretty good shape," said Ellison. "Not everyone in the world wanted to go that way. Some people want to live in a heterogeneous world. We can integrate all those systems around a common global data hub."

Ellison denied that the change in strategy was caused by financial pressure to stay ahead of rivals, even though its acquisition target PeopleSoft had recently claimed the number two market position in customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

"PeopleSoft claims to be number two but its share is shrinking at a very rapid rate," Ellison argued. "We have many more ERP [enterprise resource planning] customers than PeopleSoft. Our business grew by 27 percent last quarter, PeopleSoft's business shrank enormously."

Ellison repeatedly underlined the importance of adopting Linux on Intel (dubbed Lintel) systems to give better performance as well as value for money.

"We found that the sweet spot [for these grid systems] is dual-processor servers, not four-[processor ones]," he said. "Two-processor Lintel machines are faster, more reliable and they cost less money. The $2,500 Intel processor [3.2GHz Xeon] is twice as fast as the fastest Risc systems you can get, which cost $50,000 per processor."

He said Oracle is supporting companies that make very fast, low-cost, small servers, and will continue to back Sun.

"We think Lintel is very attractive," he added. "[Sun] will be the first to deliver very fast AMD [processor] systems running Linux. They will miss the 32bit Linux show, but they want to be first with 64bit Linux, and I think they will be."