Oracle unveiled a new open enterprise software application on Monday in the US, designed to improve the way users collaborate and communicate on projects.
Charles Phillips and Michael Phelps
(Credit: Dawn Kawamoto/CNET News)
Oracle's Beehive, a three-year-old project that the acquisition-happy software giant built from scratch, aims to take a company's current setup of running various communication and collaboration software from a variety of vendors on an army of servers and integrate the offerings into one Beehive system, said Charles Phillips, Oracle co-president, during the company's annual OpenWorld developers conference in San Francisco.
Beehive seeks to take communication software, from email to Instant Messaging to chat, and the various security rules, databases and storage that are tied to each product on separate servers and integrate them with few servers on one platform.
For example, one security rule would be set to handle disparate functions across the servers, yet the user interface would appear the same to the end user, even though they may be using different instant messaging software.
Collaboration features are also built into the Beehive software, which allow users to add members to their collaboration team, once the new member has accepted the invitation. Once they have been added to the collaboration team, the software will automatically populate their calendar with the team's meetings dates, they will be added to the team's email loop and will be able to share documents, video and other materials through Beehive's team workspace feature.
During the event, Phillips briefly shared the stage with Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps, who discussed his determination to set a new record for the number of gold medals won during the swimming competition at the Olympics. Phelps, who beat the previous record winning eight gold medals, appeared sans speedo and medals.
As for Phillips, he joked he was relieved that he and Phelps didn't have to don a swimsuit.
During the conference Oracle also officially added two industry specific business units to its approach to widen its breath of applications for targeted sectors. One will include an insurance business unit, which was recently bolstered by its acquisition of Skywire Software, and the other is a health sciences business unit.
It unveiled an update to Oracle E-Business Suite 12, with a preview of E-Business Suite 12.1. The latest version will include enhanced financial applications, with an emphasis in offering more global financial management capabilities, as well as adding supply chain and manufacturing features.
Oracle also said its recently-acquired middleware vendor BEA Systems had met its integration milestones and product roadmap laid out in July, and hit those marks ahead of deadline.
