Oracle Plans Midmarket Push With 10g

Key goals of Oracle10g, due by year's end, include bolstering the company's strong position in the enterprise and outmaneuvering Microsoft SQL Server in smaller companies, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of databases at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif.

While dodging questions about pricing and packaging, Mendelsohn told reporters and analysts that 10g will be easier and cheaper to manage than Microsoft SQL Server, which is often the database of choice for midmarket companies and enterprise departments.

"We want to be not just as good as but better than Microsoft," said Mendelsohn, adding that 10g will feature new self-managing and tuning capabilities.

That's a tall order. While many solution providers agree that Oracle's database is more scalable and reliable for big businesses, they concede also that SQL Server is much easier to install and manage than Oracle's offering.

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One new feature in 10g, the cross-platform transportable table space, will make it easier for DBAs and partners to move databases from system to system "at the speed of FTP," Mendelsohn said.

Another new feature, HTML DB, which will come bundled with 10g, promises nonprogrammers an easy way to build applications quickly. "It's analogous to [Microsoft] Access," said Mendelsohn, referring to Microsoft's easy-to-use PC database.

An easier and streamlined install , 10g will show up as one CD and be installable in 10 to 20 minutes, he said. "My 12-year-old daughter can do this," Mendelsohn said, raising some eyebrows among reporters and analysts during a Web conference that Oracle hosted in New York Thursday morning.

In addition, a new training program will turn candidates into Oracle DBAs in two days, Mendelsohn said.

Oracle executives have to date stressed how well Oracle10g (and even 9i) fits with enterprise accounts. But Mendelsohn said Thursday that the company already has a solid beachhead in the midmarket, where it has "thousands of customers and wants to grow its footprint."

Last month, Oracle acknowledged that it needs to better penetrate the SMB market and introduced Oracle Standard Edition One, a less pricey version of Oracle9i that costs $5,995 and is limited to single-processor use.

But many say that Oracle is late to the midmarket. IBM launched an aggressive midmarket push last year with DB2 Express, part of a large software lineup for companies with less than 1,000 employees.

And some remain doubtful that Oracle truly "gets" the SMB space yet. They remember the stock response from Oracle executives when asked about the company's channel strategy for smaller companies: Dell is Oracle's channel partner of choice for those customers. That answer didn't go over well with third-party VARs and integrators that support midmarket companies with constrained IT budgets.

And none of the Oracle executives on the conference Thursday would address the biggest question: price.

It appears evident, however, that many of 10g's capabilities, including integrated "clusterware," will be part of a separate RAC (real application clusters) option. With Oracle 9i, RAC costs an additional $10,000 per CPU above the database cost. Oracle 9i Enterprise Edition costs $40,000 per processor, and the Standard Edition $15,000 per CPU.

"The current thinking is that automated system management will go into the [database] product," Mendelsohn said. But it remains unclear whether the company's much-touted Enterprise Manager Grid Control, which promises to let one administrator configure and monitor many database systems, will be a separate, and separately priced, product.

One thing that is clear, however, is that Oracle is putting more and more capability--once available from third-party ISV partners--into its own software stack. 10g, for example, will offer its own automatic diagnostic monitor and tuning optimizers. The company is also adding clusterware technology licensed from Compaq (now Hewlett-Packard) to promote the use of clustering. In the past this third party software had to be installed and RAC deployed atop it. That was time-consuming and expensive, Mendelsohn said.

In addition, new automated storage management will "stripe" data across available disks and optionally mirror it for fault tolerance, a feature that no doubt piques interest at Veritas, an Oracle storage partner.