And The Next Oracle CEO Is...
"We're betting he's the next CEO of Oracle so you better get to know him if you don't already," said Phillips. Kurian looked a tad uncomfortable at that intro. Who can blame him? The greater Route 101 area is littered with former-alleged-Larry-Ellison-successors who ended up not being that at all. The Oracle poobas –sans Ellison himself—were on the road just after Oracle OpenWorld to pound the "Hot Pluggable" message home.
New SVP Tod Neilsen said the company has to correct the perception that Oracle wares (middle and otherwise) are good only for existing Oracle shops.
The whole Oracle stack—including presumably the database—can be "swapped out at any time" because the various components are all standards based, Phillips said.
Kurian chimed in: "We can run with [IBM's] MQSeries message queuing, with Sonic, Tibco. We use our own identity management for single-sign on but we also work with Active Directory."
There are nine component categories from management tools to messaging to content management to firewalls, where Oracle both fields its own offerings but where third-party products also can plug right in, he said.
That message sounds mighty familiar. Some might say that Oracle is trying to outdo IBM's anti-rip and replace mantra.
Most importantly, Kurian stressed that Oracle middleware does not require the use of Oracle's database. "Let me be clear…we certify and support typically the two most recent versions of DB2, of SQL Server….No other middleware works better with Oracle database than we do but that doesn't mean we don't support the other databases," he said.
Neilsen said Oracle, contrary to some perceptions, is a better interoperability choice than IBM itself.
"IBM says they're standard but their portal requires their application server. Their software drags in their app server," Neilsen said. Funny, IBM says that's not so at all.
In an interview later Thursday, Janet Perna, outgoing general manager of IBM's Information Management effort countered that claim. "If we bring WebSphere in, it will integrate with anything you have. And DB2 will integrate with other applications you have. In fact our whole strategy is about integration. Seems like Oracle has seen the error of its ways."
Who's a girl to believe?
Oracle is spending billions to expand beyond databases to become the business apps giant and a middleware power. The company did $800 million in middleware sales last year and aims to pass the billion dollar mark this fiscal year, Neilsen said. "That's from zero in 2001," he added. Not too shabby. Of course database sales have cooled somewhat.
Neilsen knows from middleware/apps servers coming as he did from BEA Systems.
Other tidbits from today's roundtable:
The company is tweaking the service bus to come with Oracle 10g Release 3. The new bus will add support for emerging standards like WS-Reliable Messaging. It will also be enhanced to support data transformation according to specific business rules so it will more easily change routing according to needs. And there will be support for synchronous as well as asynchronous operations, Kurian said.
Back to the lighter side, the executive panel was asked how Oracle could do better with Siebel than Siebel itself had.
The questioner listed a litany of Siebel-related woes--pricey, dysfunctional, hard-to-install software, customer dissatisfaction etc. Neilsen quipped: "They set a high bar for us."
And Phillips kidded: "Maybe, we should have talked to you before we bought it."