by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Oracle World, the big Oracle conference and trade show, started this week in San Francisco. I couldn't make it to the show on Monday, but I was thinking about popping in on Tuesday.

However, I did speak with a senior editor at a large IT publication, who is in town and attended the Oracle World keynote and other events on Monday. He said it was "boring and full of marketing hype." And that Chuck Philips, the Wall Street analyst-turned-Oracle-president, has lost any remaining vestiges of independent analytical expression and has become a full-on software salesman.

The whole enterprise software sector seems very boring anyway. Not much happening and it looks like it will stay that way for quite some time.

The enterprise software companies are sitting pretty on top of large customer bases.

There are very few new customers being created so they don't need to compete for new business. Which is why tech advertising, especially print, continues to fall.

They can live quite well off their installed customer base, on the maintenance revenues, etc.

And they face no real competition because their customer base won't buy software from small, private enterprise software companies out of fear of being left with unsupported products.

The only way private enterprise software companies can make sales is if they are partnered with larger IT companies. This means there is not much pressure to "innovate" since they can just buy up a promising private company. And with so much consolidation in the industry leaving just a few big players, they can control the valuation of private companies because there is less competitive bidding.

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