Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, used the giant Oracle
Openworld user conference in San Francisco to launch his company's
next generation Internet software, Oracle 9i. The new strategy is
based on the Oracle 9i application server and the Oracle 9i
database.
Oracle emphasised that the two products are tightly integrated.
"The Oracle 9i database and Oracle 9i application server are
designed to work together with dramatically simplified
administration. Because all critical functionality is included in
Oracle 9i, costly software integration and maintenance costs are
removed," the company said.
Oracle has also highlighted its significant investment in
wireless technology, with the integration of its Portal-to-go
technology into the 9i application server. The middleware develops
and deploys wireless Internet content and application services and
is targeted at carriers, consumer portals, Application Service
Providers (ASPs) and corporations. Oracle says it will be available
in December 2000.
Thomas Kurian, vice president, e-business, told Computer Weekly
that the company had 400 developers working on wireless
applications and that its 9i application server wireless edition
"will connect in any language, to any network, to any device,
through any protocol".
Oracle claims its pre-built adapters for wireless e-mail and
directory integration will steal a lead on its competitors who only
offer transcoding systems which convert HTML web content to
wireless format.
The wireless infrastructure software market is expected to grow
to approximately 1.2 billion subscribers worldwide by 2003,
according to The Yankee Group, which cites Europe as the most
mature market.
"The convergence of Internet and wireless communications will
result in millions of people accessing the Internet through
wireless devices, creating large revenue opportunities for wireless
platforms and applications," said The Yankee Group's director of
wireless/mobile services David Bishop, in an Oracle statement. "The
leaders of this market will produce reliable, scalable software
along with features that make it easy for their customers to go
from web to wireless."
Another key feature of Oracle 9i is new caching technology that
the company said would improve performance and scalability of
e-business applications and websites. Oracle's 9i application
server offers a database cache and a web cache sitting between the
server and the browser to speed performance.
The company has also developed "cache fusion" technology which,
it is claimed, offers "an order of magnitude improvement in
performance and reliability". Carl Olofson, Program Director for
information and data management software research at analysts IDC
said, 9i's "shared cache" environment may profoundly alter the
database market.
"Oracle has created a sophisticated architecture that makes it
easy for any IT department, any ASP, to quickly scale their systems
in two separate dimensions: processing and storage," he said. "The
ability of Oracle's customers to dynamically redistribute IT
resources, depending on their day to day, or even hour-to-hour
demands will ultimately get the greatest value out of their
computing investment," added Olofson.
Dwight Davis, research director at analysts group Summit
Strategies said Oracle's move was a reaction to market pressure
from competitors such as IBM. "In the past, Oracle placed 90% of
their emphasis on the database and the application server was a
poor second cousin," he said.