Oracle's world boils down to a case of us and them

By Stephen Ballantyne

Friday 22nd November 2002

OracleWorld, the jumbo-size convention in San Francisco's Moscone Centre that Oracle database administrators annually flock to in order to mingle with their own kind, was this year flavoured with pugnacity, mostly directed toward Microsoft.

The antipathy Oracle holds toward Microsoft on a corporate and (in chairman and CEO Larry Ellison's case) a personal level is well known and more overt than ever.

Bad-mouthing the opposition isn't usually an effective long-term sales strategy but this time it could work the US government's anti-trust suit against Microsoft may have fizzled out but inevitably it has reminded many that Microsoft can be very naughty if it isn't watched carefully.

A good time to be offering alternatives, therefore. Oracle's alternative springs from the clustering features of its 9i database.

When it was originally announced, 9i's clustering sounded like one good idea among many but in the year or two since its appearance clustering has now become the most important feature of the product. Spread a database out over many servers; you'll not only gain greater reliability (since if one server fails the others can take over without a pause), you'll also save money.

The servers don't have to be giant beasts with exotic processors they can be cheap boxes and they can run the Linux public domain operating system. No need to pay for proprietary operating systems such as Windows 2000 Server or to be stuck with Microsoft's SQL Server database.

Ditching proprietary operating systems for open source software sounds like a good idea, so why not go the whole hog and select an open source database as well, such as MySQL? Peter Thomas, Australian-based director of Oracle 9i marketing in the Asia-Pacific region, was brusquely dismissive of that notion.

"Making database software is Oracle's core business," he pointed out. "The functionality of Oracle 9i is vastly more sophisticated and versatile than any open source database." In other words, Linux will do the job but MySQL probably won't.

Up to now, in any case, there have been other reasons for staying with Microsoft, most particularly Microsoft Exchange Server, which many businesses use to co-ordinate their internal and external communications.

To counter this, Oracle announced its Collaboration Suite, which not only provides full communications service meaning mainly email but with additional rich media features to any browser or other standards-compliant client but also keeps its data in an Oracle database, where it can be searched and analysed more efficiently than before.

Should you wish to know, for example, what communications your company may have had in the past with a specific customer, it's easy to summon up the lot from the database.

Steven Levine, Oracle's VP for Collaboration Suite marketing, admits Oracle's product is pursuing Exchange more hotly than other competitors, notably Lotus Notes: "Exchange has a larger chunk of the market. Globally, Exchange owns 50% of the market while Lotus owns 28%. We're going after the bigger fish.

"The other thing is Microsoft has failed to completely move its customer base from 5.5 to 2000 and that's a great market opportunity for us. We also offer a better value proposition in that we can take you from an email-only solution to full collaboration."

Mr Levine also admits Lotus customers are often more loyal to their product because they build specialised applications with it, using the tools built into the Notes-Domino combination; migrating such customers is possible, thanks to the Java facilities included in Oracle, but will take more time.

The Collaboration Suite announcement was as close as OracleWorld came to news in the normal sense but that's standard Oracle usually announces new products when it's ready rather than at the conference. OracleWorld is mainly for database administrators, who are presented with hundreds of technical seminars to attend.

Another reason for OracleWorld is to learn how Oracle is faring. In his keynote speech at the opening of the conference Oracle chief financial officer Jeff Henley passed as briskly as possible over the extraordinary news that Oracle's earnings were down for the first time not down by much but it's an unwelcome novelty, though not unexpected given the economic climate. Revenue $US10 billion, net income $US2.2 billion, operating margins at 36% for Oracle that's a bad year.

Keynote speeches on subsequent days served to remind attendees who the good guys and the bad guys are in the Oracle world view. Paul Otellini, Intel's president, is good, because Intel makes the inexpensive CPUs that Oracle hopes will help spread its products into new, possibly less well-heeled markets.

Similarly, Dell is good; it is the company that has best understood that there is nothing magic about PCs they are simply commodities to be sold as efficiently as possible and are therefore ideal machines for deployment in standardised clusters running Linux and Oracle.

If you're looking for an anti-Microsoft moral to this, note that Dell's freedom to sell systems bundled with Linux was won over the opposition of Microsoft, which in the past has attempted to make computer manufacturers that bundled Windows with their hardware pay the Windows licence fee on all their machines, even those sold with Linux rather than Windows.

Ultimately it was Mr Ellison who delivered the best keynote performance. And that's as it should be. Mr Ellison epitomises the cult of the charismatic CEO his speech, live from Takapuna, projected on to a big screen larger than life, was clever, funny, at times contrarian, always entertaining and ultimately purposeful.

We have bought too many databases, he said, with the result that our data is now fragmented rather than unified. Moral: Oracle 9i can reunite scattered data.

There is too much software integration it shouldn't be necessary to combine multiple products from many vendors to produce working systems. Oracle would rather sell everyone a small number of comprehensive software products that work together from the outset.

Finally, incomplete automation means business software such as ERP systems have always needed to be finished off by consultants. Oracle is working toward more standardised solutions that will pretty much run straight out of the box.

The way he puts it suggests that Mr Ellison's version of the future of corporate computing could well prove to be correct and that Oracle will be a major player for some time to come.

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