Oracle sees sunnier 2003

“During the first half of calendar '03, we'll start to see this thing turn around,” Henley said. However, he backed Oracle's previous guidance for the second quarter, predicting lower year on year revenue and earnings of between eight and nine cents per share. In the same quarter a year ago, Oracle posted earnings of 10 cents per share.

Oracle said growth will come from more favourable comparisons with corresponding quarters and business growth from pent up demand. Oracle has suffered declining sales for six straight quarters.

Meanwhile, Oracle has used the conference to announce strengthened ties with HP, detailing plans to have Oracle 9i running on HP's Itanium powered servers with the HP-VX operating system by year's end.

The company have also started a program to ease installation of Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) across all HP hardware. The companies will also provide joint monitoring services for high end customers' data centres, with HP's OpenView now able to work with Oracle's Remote Diagnostic Assistant.