Outsourcing is easiest, Linux is great and Web services have been
hyped like something out of the women's fashion industry, Oracle's
chairman and chief executive officer announcec yesterday in a
wide-ranging address at Oracle AppsWorld.
Upgrading to Oracle's newest suite of business applications can be
a tricky process, especially for customers who have modified the
Oracle applications they already have, but outsourcing the work to
Oracle can make the job a lot simpler, claimed chairman and CEO
Larry Ellison said, in a speech that was broadcast from San Diego
over the Web.
"The good news about 11i is it's Internet-based," he said,
referring to the latest version of Oracle's E-Business Suite. "The
bad news is a lot of people running (version) 10.7 are not familiar
with this technology."
Installing any large suite of ERP (enterprise resource planning) or
CRM (customer relationship management) software, from Oracle,
PeopleSoft or any other vendor, is going to be a huge task, Ellison
said. Since Oracle knows its applications best, customers should
trust it to install and maintain the software for them, leaving
them to focus on running their businesses.
The pitch has become a common refrain, as Oracle pushes hard for
customers to upgrade to its newest suite of e-business software and
adopt its hosting services. But judging by questions posed by the
audience after Ellison's speech, doubts about the outsourcing model
remain.
"Is Oracle going to guarantee 100% uptime?" asked one audience
member.
"I believe not even NASA guarantees 100%uptime, that's literally
impossible," Ellison replied. "(But) we do guarantee lower cost and
higher satisfaction."
If Oracle assumes responsibility for a customer's software, another
audience member asked, how could it ever match "all the years of
knowledge and experience" that customers have accumulated about
their own applications, particularly those that have been
customised?
"You really don't have to outsource everything to Oracle," Ellison
replied. More commonly, Oracle would handle maintenance and
upgrades for most business applications, but customers could
continue to extend those applications and keep control of
customised software they consider particularly crucial.
Another customer asked if Oracle is committed to Windows NT.
Ellison said that the company is committed to Windows - but showed
markedly more enthusiasm for Linux. Whenever Oracle demonstrates
its products "anywhere in the world", he said, it does so on
clusters of Intel servers running Linux.
He also reiterated a pledge made earlier in the year to move
Oracle's internal applications - its "entire Oracle E-Business
suite, the whole mid-tier" - on to clusters of two-processor Linux
systems. He said the process should be completed sometime this
year.
"We think that gives you not only low-cost systems but a highly
reliable, fault-tolerant system," he said.
"We're big fans of Intel," he added. "Windows was the dominant
platform for a while. We continue to support it aggressively. We
also support Linux, which is a great alternative."
Another audience member asked when Web services will move beyond a
stage where it can be used to exchange "little blocks of code" to
allow "real applications to be run in a Web services model".
"You can only understand Web services if you've been in the fashion
industry," Ellison replied. "If you're in the women's clothing
industry, you have a pretty good idea how Silicon Valley
works."
Web services may be fashionable, but are no panacea, he
added.
"Web services is a very important new technology, we are fully
behind Web services. But the idea that Oracle is going to put a Web
services interface on its applications, and [that] Siebel is going
to do that, and that that's going to make it easier for you to
connect Oracle to SAP, or Siebel to SAP, that's just the most
ridiculous thing I've heard in my entire life," he said.
Web services provides a set of standards that makes it easier for
two computers to speak to each other over the Internet, but
underlying "semantic differences" in applications make it difficult
to link software programs from separate vendors, he said.
"We're the largest supplier of software for building Web services
in the world, but don't be misled," he said. "It's not going to do
all the things that people claim it will do."
Oracle AppsWorld runs until April 10. Some keynote speeches have
been archived on the Web and can be accessed via
www.oracle.com/appsworld/.