Oracle's self-reported project success/failure statistics

During a meeting (described here by Dan Farber) between Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, and the Enterprise Irregulars, I raised the inevitable implementation failure question:

Serious implementation problems continue across the industry, including on Oracle projects. What is Oracle doing to address this issue?

Charles said that implementation failures are largely a thing of the past, and that:

Ninety percent of Oracle projects are successful.

It's an interesting statistic, but differs substantially from recent research on IT project failures. Most research suggests that 30%-60% of IT projects are "challenged" in some important way. Obviously, this data is at odds with the number tossed out by Charles.

Brian Sommer, fellow Enterprise Irregular, commented: "It's hard to accept stats like that without seeing the meat behind them." Yeah, I have to agree.