Oracle: we are the business

By ADAM GIFFORD

Oracle has unveiled plans to be the dominant supplier in all aspects of business computing, not just databases, by the time chairman Larry Ellison comes down here to challenge for the America's Cup.

Last week's release of its new internet Application Server (iAS) middleware and release 3 of the Oracle 8i database reflects the results of a five-year programme to make all its products ready for the internet.

Pricing has also been simplified, with almost half its products now being thrown in as standard features of the core products.

The only options that will cost more are those which provide advanced degrees of security or improve performance.

The "Oracle.now" announcement came with the sort of take-no-prisoners approach to competition the industry has come to expect from the Silicon Valley heavyweight.

First up for a slagging was old enemy Microsoft, which has just unveiled its Microsoft.Net initiative to make all its software interact with the internet and allow for a wide range of new services.

"We call it Microsoft.Not," product marketing senior vice-president Jeremy Burton told an Asia Pacific conference-call briefing.

He said that Microsoft head Bill Gates was talking about services not being ready for two years, if then.

Oracle's internet Application Server 8i is ready now for the Sun Solaris platform, with NT and Linux versions due in a few weeks and other flavours of Unix soon after.

The application server takes requests from the web and translates them into the languages used by back-end systems. It incorporates the open source Apache web server.

The iAS includes business intelligence services, forms services, portal services, component services, dynamic data cacheing, web/http services and integration services in one product.

Mr Burton said anyone building an internet solution on a Microsoft platform had to put up with the fact that many pieces would be missing, such as cacheing, Java functionality and portal building.

The Oracle developer community was now growing at the rate of more than 2000 a day, from 20,000 people two years ago to 900,000 now.

"This is a key indicator of the kind of applications people are building.

"Before, for every one [developer] we had, Microsoft had 100. Now it's one to three."

To make it easier for developers to get the tools they need, Oracle has compacted its tools into one Internet Developer Suite.

The suite includes Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Portal and Oracle Forms Developer and Designer, as well as its business intelligence tools, Oracle Reports and Oracle Discoverer.

Oracle Portal is a new product which allows developers to rapidly assemble portal sites using a web browser by assembling components, called portlets.

These portlets can pull together the information, applications and services users need.

In this way it is a catch-up to SAP's mySAP.com Workplace, released a year ago.

The developer suite costs $US4995 ($10,700) per named user. Previously the total cost of the five tools sold separately was $US14,000.

The simplification also extends to the Oracle 8i database, which now includes workflow, standard management tools, visual information retrieval capabilities and everything needed to run any database application.

Next up for a kicking was IBM. Mr Burton said IBM also had many of the pieces needed to move business to the internet, but none of the pieces worked well together. As a result the company needed 130,000 consultants.

He said that before the latest release, Oracle, too, was also too complex and required a lot of consultancy work.

Collapsing many technology products into the Oracle 8i database and iAS removed a lot of complexity.

IBM has combined much of its middleware into the WebSphere suite to bring its installed base forward.

With iAS now available, IBM is in for a tough year.

Mr Burton said other niche vendors such as BEA would also be targeted, as Oracle leveraged its iAS middleware against its huge database business.