Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison took time out Thursday from watching his boat go 2-0 up in the quarter-finals of the America's Cup challenge series in New Zealand to address delegates at OracleWorld in San Francisco via videolink.

Successfully dodging why it was more important to oversee his sailing team than be with his customers (he was kicked off his boat in the prelims after failing to show the skill at steering ships he possesses in shifting software), Ellison talked about information and software integration, the state of the IT industry, and took his customary pop at Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Ellison said the problem of getting value out of the huge volumes of information in disparate databases was causing IT managers huge headaches.

"We are in the business of selling databases and you have bought too many of them. You have so many separate databases in your companies that it is very difficult for you to know where to look when you are trying to get some information," he said.

"My industry has produced so many different software products and you have bought too many of them. We sell technology components - lots of parts, and it's up to you to figure out how to assemble all of these different parts from different vendors into working systems, no instructions included.

"It's difficult, it's time consuming, it's unpredictable and it's very costly. Information fragmentation is perhaps the most serious problem blocking our migration into the information age."

Moving on to the economy, Ellison said the downturn was not as bad as it felt. "We had an incredible bubble. The 'experts' said that webvan and pets.com were worth billions. Then when the bubble burst they said no one is going to use computers ever again and all technology companies are worthless.

"These are the same idiots. The contrast of 2000 to 2002 is pretty extraordinary, so it feels worse than it really is," he said.

Ellison also said there was no future for specialist companies who had floated and crashed. "Some companies will never come back. A lot of the specialist companies will never come back," he said.

"One time Ariba was worth more than Daimler-Benz. All Ariba had was an itty-bitty software product that let you type in a purchase request in a web browser. Two cats could have written that whole application. And it was worth more than Daimler-Benz, the largest industrial company in Europe. It was absolute madness.

"Ariba will never come back, Commerce One will never come back. Who would have believed that i2, the world leader in supply chain, would largely vanish?" he said.

Ellison rounded up by talking about security, using it as an opportunity to take his now traditional and anticipated attack on Microsoft. "Bill Gates said he was going to devote the whole month of February to security. It was a short month," he said.

Oracle's record on security and its "unbreakable" policy stood up against Microsoft, according to Ellison.

"We went from a couple of thousand attacks a week on our website to 20,000 or 30,000. Do you know how often they broke into an Oracle database? Zero. The hackers' union has complained that we were inciting them to attack us just so we could test our software without having to pay for it," he said.