Scoffing at reports alleging the adoption of SOA is slowing, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said this week that moving to SOA is a slow process but one that presents an opportunity for Oracle.

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.