Speaking on Oracle's earnings conference call Wednesday, Ellison said he had read news articles about the slowing adoption of SOA. But he stressed that SOA requires a change in architecture, which takes time to implement.

"While I've read [these articles], people have to understand when you have a fundamentally new computer software architecture, SOA, it takes a long time for adoption," Ellison said. Moving to SOA is not as easy as flipping a switch, he said.

"It takes about 10 to 20 years before [you can] rewrite all of your applications," he said. But Oracle sees this process accelerating in its middleware business.

"We think it's a long-term growth story, it's a very rapid growth story," said Ellison. "It takes a long time for our customers to have a majority of their applications modernized, and we think this is a growth story for a decade for us," he said.

For the quarter ending November 30, Oracle reported revenues of $5.3 billion, a 28 percent increase over the $4.16 billion reported for the same quarter last year. Net income was $1.3 billion, a 35 percent increase over the $967 million reported for the same time period in 2006.