Application renewal will be a theme in 2006 with 45 percent of organizations expecting to make significant cuts to legacy maintenance and only 8 percent choosing to spend more on it. Replacement applications will most likely be custom built, as companies are turning away from packaged solutions like SAP and Oracle.

Higgins said that Oracle's strategy and Fusion roadmap may have caused a small amount of end user dissatisfaction in this market, but that is not the main influential factor.

"Oracle's acquisition strategy would be a small blip in an otherwise healthy outlook for it. I think the main reason is that everyone has already done their spending. There is only so much ERM and CRM people can do," he said.

Higgins said companies are instead looking to integrate applications by hand, spending their money with traditional application development platform giants like Microsoft and IBM.

"If you compare Oracle's view of application development with Microsoft and IBM, Microsoft and IBM strangely enough have a much broader view of interoperability and openness than Oracle does. Things like JDeveloper, as standards-based as they first appear, really can lock people in to the Oracle view," he said.