He also offered perspectives on the GlassFish application server Oracle acquired with Sun. GlassFish, Harris said, brings a set of developers, a methodology and an approach to development for Oracle to absorb into its DNA, Harris said. Oracle has positioned GlassFish as a departmental application server while the former BEA WebLogic application server is the company's primary enterprise application server. But that has not stopped Oracle's James Gosling, CTO for the company's client software group and a former Sun official, from lauding GlassFish as he did last week.

Oracle officials Wednesday also committed to supporting three separate IDEs: JDeveloper, which the company already has owned; Eclipse, developed by the Oracle-backed Eclipse Foundation, and newly acquired NetBeans IDE that came over in the Sun buy.

"We understand there is a bit of religion," around IDEs, said Dennis Leung, Oracle vice president of software development. "People are religious, very passionate about the IDEs they use. We're not here to convert people."

Leung also said Oracle has been the second-most active participant in the Eclipse community for a number of years. The most active participant is Eclipse founder IBM, according to the foundation.