Competition in the software business is intense. Our goal is to maintain a first or second position in each of our software product categories and certain industry segments as well as to grow our software revenues faster than our competitors. We believe that the features and functionality of our software products are as strong as they have ever been. We have focused on lowering the total cost of ownership of our software products by improving integration, decreasing installation times, lowering administration costs and improving the ease of use. In addition, our broad portfolio of product offerings (many of which have been acquired over the past four fiscal years) helps us to offer customers the ability to gain efficiencies by consolidating their IT “software stack” with a single vendor, which reduces the number of disparate software vendors with which customers interact. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their IT investments, which we believe creates more demand for our products and services and provides us with a competitive advantage. We have also continued to focus on improving the overall quality of our software products and service levels. We believe this will lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty and help us achieve our goal of becoming our customers’ leading technology advisor.

 

Software License Updates and Product Support:   Customers that purchase software license updates and product support are granted rights to unspecified product upgrades and maintenance releases issued during the support period, as well as technical support assistance. In addition, we offer Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support, which provides enterprise level support for the Linux operating system and, in fiscal 2008, we introduced support for Oracle VM server virtualization software. Substantially all of our customers renew their software license updates and product support contracts annually. The growth of software license updates and product support revenues is primarily influenced by three factors: (1) the renewal rate of the support contract base, (2) the amount of new support contracts sold in connection with the sale of new software licenses, and (3) the support contract base assumed from companies we have acquired.

 

Software license updates and product support revenues, which represented 46% of our total revenues in fiscal 2008, 2007 and 2006, is our highest margin business unit. Support margins during fiscal 2008 were 85%, and accounted for 76% of our total margins over the same period. We believe that software license updates and product support revenues and margins will continue to grow for the following reasons:

	• 	Substantially all of our customers, including customers from acquired companies, renew their support contracts when eligible for renewal.

	• 	Substantially all of our customers purchase license updates and product support contracts when they buy new software licenses, resulting in a further increase in our support contract base. Even if new software license revenue growth was flat, software license updates and product support revenues would continue to