Oracle regrouped its product line yesterday into the Oracle Internet Platform, a move that reflected something old, something new, something borrowed, but not anything blue.
The announcement came the day after Oracle's closest competitor, IBM www.ibm.com, updated its DB2 Universal Server with to version 7.0. The regrouping reflected the intense competition between the two companies. Oracle www.oracle.com said it was adding Java, eXtensible Markup Language and business intelligence features to its Oracle8i database system, just as IBM had done with its core product the day before.
Also new, said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president at Oracle Server Technologies, is Oracle Developer Suite, which includes Oracle Designer, Oracle Forms and JDeveloper, the Java developer tool that is the Oracle-adapted version of the JBuilder tool from Imprise/Borland www.inprise.com.
In addition, the Developer Suite includes Portal Services, a set of site management and presentation services that allow a personalised view of a Web site's applications in a browser. Rounding out the five-piece tool set is Business Intelligence Services, which includes the ad hoc end-user query tool, Oracle Discoverer, and Oracle Reports, a data access and publishing tool.
Reports and Discoverer were also pre-existing elements of the product line. By grouping them into the Developer Suite, Oracle is "repackaging and simplifying our products for reasons of quality and simplicity," said Gary Bloom, executive vice president at Oracle. Instead of individual pricing that formerly totaled US$14,000, the five tools are now available as a set for US$4,995.
In addition, the company is relaunching Oracle Application Server, which has been rewritten as Java middleware and renamed Oracle Internet Application Server, or Oracle iAS. Oracle iAS now includes the popular open source code Apache Web server, and dynamic caching of the most frequently accessed data in the database. Serving pages or data sets that are already in a server's main memory tends to be much faster than relying on repeated database retrievals of data.
The relaunch of Oracle Application Server, a product about which Oracle has been silent for a year, reflects the growing importance of the application server as a cornerstone of e-business operations. IBM has strongly promoted its WebSphere set of application servers over the last year and tied them more closely to its DB2 system. International Data predicted the application server market, typically described as "middleware" because it sits between legacy systems and their users on the Web, will grow from US$994 million this year to US$11 billion by 2004.
Despite its dependence on repackaged elements, Oracle titled its announcement yesterday, "Oracle takes the middleware market by storm."
The need of e-business "to analyse and understand customer information" derived from Web site visits "is driving the steady adoption of business intelligence tools," said Thomas Murphy, program director at Meta Group.
"Business intelligence is critical to the success of e-business," said Sohaib Abbasi, Oracle's senior vice president of development.
Janet Perna, general manager of data management at IBM, said DB2 7.0 includes data warehouse management capabilities and incorporates the latest Hyperion business intelligence analytical engine in DB2.
"DB2 plays strongly in business intelligence, particularly in data warehouses over one terabyte," she said. She noted another enterprise resource planning vendor, PeopleSoft, has moved to DB2 as its development platform, with SAP AG and Siebol preceding it in doing so.
When asked if Oracle's entry into customer relationship management applications in competition with SAP and PeopleSoft had anything to do with the move, she said the primary reason was DB2's technology but added, "I suspect the direct competition is also a factor."
