Oracle President Charles Phillips (pictured) delivered the opening keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco today and outlined  the critical factors for business success today, viewed through the lens of Oracle's hugely-expanded range of solutions now that it has acquired PeopleSoft, Oblix, TimesTen, Retek, I-flex, and Siebel. 

Foremost among Phillips' anouncements was that customers who want reassurance that they can continue to use their existing
Oracle software indefinitely would receive Lifetime Support:

"Protect, extend, evolve -- that's our approach to innovation. "We've never left a customer behind, and customers come with us through
technologies. That's how we get 275,000 customers."

"We'll give you both innovation and lifetime support at a measured pace," Phillips said. "We have the scale to make this happen."

Phillips explained how Oracle can help businesses to not only execute more quickly, but implement informed, predictable business processes that are built to scale according to demand.

"There was a reason we changed the name of this conference back to Oracle OpenWorld," he declared at one point, by way of underlining Oracle's commitment to open standards (such as various web services standards, and of course XML).