Spying Flap Upstages Oracle's New E-Strategy

The complexity of e-business solution implementation is making e-businesses hungry for a standardized technology platform, industry analysts say. On June 28, Oracle Corp. served up a radically simplified and unified Oracle Internet Platform aimed at sating that hunger. Amid brouhaha about the company's private investigation of Microsoft Corp.'s alleged monopolistic practices, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled two new products in its Internet solutions suite, as well as big price reductions on bundled offerings.

At the product release press conference here at Oracle's headquarters, Ellison took a no-apologies stance to charges that his company had spied on Microsoft. Oracle had hired Investigative Group International to check out Microsoft supporters Independence Insatiate and National Taxpayers Union. "It's absolutely true we set out to expose Microsoft's covert actions," he says, adding that he "felt very good" about Oracle's actions, even though he had not been aware that private investigators had been hired. "We were trying to expose what Microsoft was doing," he says.

Playing second fiddle at the press conference, the new Oracle Internet Platform solution set and strategy could be more trouble to Microsoft than Oracle's spying, analysts say. Ellison hopes so, noting that "we're trying to move from second to first position."

The new products include Oracle Internet Application Server (iAS) 8i and Oracle Internet Developer Suite. They flesh out Oracle's suites of Internet products, which include the popular Oracle 8i Internet database and Oracle E-Business Suite 11i enterprise applications. A new release--the third--of the Oracle 8i database was also displayed. It will update its Java and XML technologies and bring an advanced, triple Data Encryption Standard for data protection.

Integrating the database (Oracle8i Release 3) and application (Oracle iAS) levels brings unified security, messaging, development platforms and transactional capabilities, analysts say. The single-suite approach could dramatically simplify the infrastructure required for e-businesses, reducing the cost and time to market, they note.

"Today, most businesses spend an inordinate amount of time getting the various components to work with one another [because multivendor solutions are all that are available]," says Sahaib Abbasi, senior vice president of Oracle tools. "With today's announcement, we are providing a single suite of services that will provide all of the functionality required to deploy corporate portals."

Oracle8i Release 3, Standard and Enterprise Edition will ship before the end of the summer and will be bundled with B2B workflow and standard management packs for free. Those former options to the database were previously priced and sold separately.

Oracle Internet Application Server 8i is entirely Java-based and includes options for mobile applications. It promises to accelerate Web application response with dynamic caching. Oracle Internet Developer Suite "provides developers with all of the tools required for building portals, doing Java programming and for model-based development and business intelligence," Abbasi says. This is the first time that a complete suite of development tools like this has been packaged and priced together.

Oracle is adding some 2,000 developers a day to its roster of almost 1 million developers in the Oracle Technical Network. Oracle development tools are provided free to OTN subscribers. "We're getting a phenomenal response," Abbasi says. "It's stunning, really, to be signing up 2,000 developers a day."