Oracle Continues To Push Beyond Databases

At Oracle World here, the company hopes to show it can win new customers,even those without Oracle databases,with its collaboration and other products.

The goal with Oracle Collaboration Suite is to "out-innovate and outprice" IBM and Microsoft in the e-mail space, said Rene Bonvanie, vice president of Oracle9i marketing. Winning converts is key for Oracle, which saw new license sales fall 23 percent for its latest quarter ended Aug. 31, according to the company's latest results.

Oracle plans to add realtime perks such as instant messaging to the current Collaboration Suite offering, which shipped in October, sources said. The suite already melds voice mail, e-mail, calendaring and unified search.

Microsoft and IBM's Lotus Software group already field instant messaging offerings, and both lead the market in e-mail servers. In 2001, Microsoft led the pack with 88 million Exchange Server seats, and Lotus followed with 74 million seats, according to IDC.

However, both companies have telegraphed major technology shifts that could disrupt their installed bases. Microsoft is moving the focus of its realtime collaboration to Windows .Net Server from Exchange Server, and both Lotus and Microsoft are shifting their message stores to a relational model.

Any time a migration looks costly or painful, there's the potential for customers to defect, said Amy Wohl, president of research firm Wohl Associates.

Bonvanie admitted that Oracle's past efforts to build e-mail server market share have fallen short. "In the past %85 we built the infrastructure with the idea that we could put in a client to do document publishing and sharing [and e-mail," he said. "We've abandoned that idea."

Bonvanie said Oracle's Collaboration Suite, at $60 per user, costs one-third as much as Microsoft Exchange, even in volume deals.

Marc Hebert, executive vice president at Oracle partner Sierra Atlantic, Fremont, Calif., is bullish on the collaboration offering. "We haven't seen a ton of traction with it yet, but the marketing hasn't really kicked in. We're excited about it," he said.

Oracle also is segmenting partners along product lines and providing ISVs, integrators and VARs with their own program benefits.

The company will recruit regional integrators to attack the midmarket, said Julie Tung, Oracle's vice president of global alliances and channels. A new Accelerator Level designation will offer targeted partners the benefits of being certified partners without requiring them to meet membership criteria for one year, Tung said.