Despite Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel, which creates a potential applications juggernaut, IBM will stick to its guns and not be pressured into entering the applications market, IBM’s Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for the company’s software group, said on Tuesday morning. The company will instead remain in the business of selling ancillary software, hardware and services to applications users, Mills said during a teleconference pertaining to the vendor’s SOA product rollout.“The ecosystem surrounding all applications vendors, be it Oracle or Microsoft or any other vendor, is many times larger than the revenue of those applications, often a factor of 10 [times] bigger,” said Mills. “We’re the largest providers within [Oracle’s] ecosystem,” he said. “IBM realizes many billions of dollars a year from these relationships,” with Oracle product users, Mills saidMills added he is not concerned with the possibility that the former PeopleSoft and Siebel applications may be more finely tuned to run with an Oracle database than IBM’s DB2. While Oracle cannot be expected to promote DB2, other application vendors may respond to Oracle’s applications buy by forging tighter links with IBM, according to Mills. He cited SAP as an example of how this already has happened. “The ecosystem adjusts itself and for every action there is a reaction,” Mills said. Software Development