How do you view competitive plans from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the Web services area?
With HP, we are very complementary. There is a lot of ongoing work to make sure that the work we do and the work they do, that customers get the combined benefit…In the case of IBM, every day you can write an article about IBM and Microsoft this or that, because we work on so many things and we compete on so many things. IBM is the biggest company in the computer industry by most measures. We are the biggest by just the volume of our model, (which) means our products are out there in big numbers. So the work we do together is pretty important. We are very pleased that IBM is serious about XML Web services. If you look at standards efforts like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), IBM has been a very good partner. When it comes to implementing the platform, they go and do WebSphere and we go and do .Net. It’s like it has been on everything. In some cases they actually license our stuff, like they sell Windows-based servers.
