IT Services Vs. IT Product

Indian IT industry and IT players have often been criticised by so-called 'arm chair critics' for being service oriented and not being product oriented. They often criticise companies like TCS and Infosys for not investing much in creating products instead looking for quick money by going after service market where money in relatively easy to be made.
But I see nothing wrong in this. It's with this same service industry that entire India got the confidence which it enthuse today. Before the birth of same the IT industry, hardly any industry was confident enough to stand up on it's own feet forget about going into the world arena but today many players from other industries like steel, automobiles, FMGC, electronics ect. are becoming global thanks to the path shown this IT service industry.
Critics forget this. They forget that to reach to the top one has to take small steps. You can not simply spring to the top but you have to take small baby steps initially then take faster steps and once confident you go into fast lane. That's what IT industry has been doing. Now we are even seeing some product companies in India as well. I will not say that we'll displace US just tomorrow in product space, that will again take time. Moutains can not be moved just overnight, they take their own time. So we'll also take time to build IT product industry.
Critics compare that TCS was even born before Microsoft and they say look where Microsoft is, but they turn blind eye to the environment each of these companies born in. Where India was when TCS was born, that was not the market supportive of any kind of industry. India was a bleeding ground for freed enterprises before 90s whereas US have been breeding ground.
So you can not compare a poor's son with that of a King's when comparing their lives and achievements. But with the kind of environment created by these giant IT service players, not the ground is set for product companies to take birth.

Oracle in DWS Space

Oracle database is mainly a product suitable for transation processing systems (OLTP) and it's got a dominant position in that market, a clear leadership. This market is almost saturated now with not much growth or expansion left in this area. Newer market for growth is datawarehousing (DWH) space where the growth is at the moment and it would be high growth area in forseeable future as corporations across the world try to make sense out of data stored in OLTP systems. Such DWH systems require huge storage capacity and huge data processing capabilities. Normally the database products suitable for OLTP are not suitable for DWH.

The leader in DWH space is Teradata which can store huge amount of data and has got huge processing capabilities as well. Netezza is another promising product in this area.

Oracle being such a agressive company currently has got no product in this area and Larry Elison would definitely not give a miss to such a growth-promising area. He would definitely try to enter into this area. Building a product from scratch would not be a feasible solution for him. So Larry would definitely try to gobble up any of existing product either Teradata , which is listing soon on bourses, or Netezza.
We would not be surprised if Larry does a hostile bid, like done many in recent past in ERP space, for any of these or any other such product in DWH area.