Ellison: Oracle To Follow Microsoft’s Lead In Taking Territory

It's not often that Larry Ellison has something nice to say about Microsoft, but Oracle's game is essentially to follow Microsoft's lead in taking territory previously held by former ISV partners, he said.

"Business Objects [and] BEA are living on the Oracle database installed base and are living on borrowed time. I have great admiration for what Microsoft did rolling up Lotus and WordPerfect in its Windows family," said the Oracle chairman and CEO. "The Microsoft strategy is to build better software, charge less and make it up on volume."

Of course, Oracle isn't exactly known for charging less for its software. But Ellison has always maintained that if support, integration and consulting costs are factored in, even Oracle's pricey database is less expensive than IBM's DB2 and sometimes even less expensive than Microsoft's SQL Server.

By building more functions--such as business intelligence and OLAP--into its core database, Oracle has taken aim at a slew of partner ISVs. It is hardly new ground. Oracle already competes with application partners such as Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and SAP with its own enterprise applications.

"We offer better cost of ownership than the data warehousing companies, business intelligence and J2EE people. They are in our backyard and that is an ugly place to be," Ellison said in a press conference following his Oracle OpenWorld keynote Tuesday afternoon.

Characterizing such competitive business intelligence and application server offerings as "best of breed," Ellison said their time has come. "Best of breed is going the way of client/server," he said. "Ariba, Commerce One--they're not companies, they're not even products. They're features."

"Hiring IBM to glue i2, Ariba, etc., together--that's the high-priced spread," he said.

In past months, business intelligence and analytics companies have been under fire as other vendors from extract transformation load (ETL) kingpin Informatica and CRM leader Siebel--and before that even Microsoft--started building analytics into their core offerings. Business intelligence companies, such as Business Objects and others, maintain that these base-level analytics bundled with other products merely whet users' appetites for more fully functioned analytic offerings that take data and slice and dice it in ways that uncover otherwise hard-to-find trends and occurrences.

Philip Russom, an independent analyst based in Waltham, Mass., agreed. "Oracle's advantage lies in integration issues. Data warehousing is an exercise in integration, and Oracle helps keep consulting costs down. The con is that Oracle is not a best-of-breed component. The current state of their OLAP is pretty pathetic," he said. "If you seriously want to analyze what you've got, you'll want to use Business Objects, Cognos, Brio or SAS."

Ellison also dismissed a new data warehousing initiative launched last week by Oracle ally Sun Microsystems with its database rival Sybase. "I didn't know and I don't care," he said. "Sybase has been dead a long time. Let them rest in peace."