DATABASES SHIFT TOWARD MORE CENTRALIZED ARCHITECTURES.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), the number one choice for e-business, has announced the overwhelmingly positive results of a survey conducted by SoundView Technology Group, indicating that buying intentions for Oracle's database are both strong and clearly ahead of competitors' for implementing new applications. Additionally, the survey cites continued growth and a visible shift toward more centralized architectures, concluding that this is likely due to the growth of the Internet. The survey sampled approximately 100 senior executives and IT managers, and is the most recent such survey published by SoundView on the market.

"Our survey concludes that Oracle remains the clear leader with respect to overall spending indications, as well as its strategic importance to companies," said Jim Mendelson, managing director, SoundView Technology Group, an investment bank focused on the technology marketplace. "We also found that spending indications for the database market continue to remain strong, with no signs of a slowdown. This is positive news for the database industry and even more positive news for Oracle who appears to be benefiting the most." "As the internet gold rush continues, software buyers are making a clear decision to buy the best software they can to power their e-businesses," said Mark Jarvis, senior vice president Worldwide Marketing, Oracle Corp. "Ninety-five percent of successful e-commerce companies choose Oracle because Oracle software powers the Internet."

The SoundView survey includes such other prominent indicators for the RDBMS market as which database vendor is of most strategic importance to companies, spending intentions by application type, purchase criteria (scalability, experience, data warehousing support and price), and spending intentions for hardware platforms and emerging DBMS architectures for complex data types.

Spending intention by application type are strongest for business-to-business commerce and customer relationship management. Spending indications for ERP are also found to be positive. Scalability as it relates to transaction processing speed ranked as the most important feature in terms of RDBMS purchase criteria. Finally, platform spending intentions strongly favor Unix and NT, with a majority of respondents ranking spending intentions for IBM MVS and AS/400 as same or less.

SoundView Technology Group is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, with offices in San Francisco. SoundView was founded in 1979 initially as part of GartnerGroup, Inc., but is now privately owned.

Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest software company. With annual revenues of more than $9.3 billion, the company offers its database, application server, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world.

For more information about Oracle, call 650/506-7000.