Delegates at OracleWorld in London next week will hear about
updates to CRM and small business products but may have to wait for
major new launches
Users and analysts attending OracleWorld, Oracle's three-day user
conference in London next week, are more likely to hear a tranche
of product updates than major product announcements.
Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group, said, "We are
very interested to see if Oracle will have any significant message.
Database and Application Server 10g have already been announced and
people are ready to use it. But there have been no preparations for
any big Oracle applications announcements. The application
community is anticipating a big release."
New products from Oracle are likely to cluster around a low-cost
version of its Application Server suite; the recently released
Oracle CRM 11i.10; and forthcoming 11i.10 releases of Oracle's
E-Business Suite applications, such as Financials, Human Resources
and Manufacturing.
Oracle may also discuss its decision to roll out monthly security
patches for applications, rather than its current policy of ad hoc
updates.
Miles said he was expecting Oracle to unveil details of its On
Demand strategy to provide managed services to control Oracle
applications for its customers.
Thomas Kurian, senior vice-president of development for Oracle
Application Server, said the company was expected to bring out a
cut-down version of its Application Server software. This is a
half-price version of its application server for small and
medium-sized firms that will include Oracle's Application Server,
Web Server and Portal software. Oracle plans to charge £2,750 per
processor for Standard Edition One on a total of two servers.
Kurian said Standard Edition One will further Oracle's strategy of
increasing the licensing options for customers who are interested
in buying only part of its Application Server suite. Standard
Edition One will support Windows and Linux and undercut Microsoft
on licensing costs, he said.
Oracle already uses the Standard Edition One label with a
mid-market version of its 10g database software.
The suite will take Oracle head to head with Microsoft in the
mid-market, as well as IBM - one of Oracle's biggest rivals - which
has been selling IBM Express, a discounted version of its
application server software, for the past two years.
"A few years ago, the idea of IBM selling to SMEs was ridiculous,
but it has been successful. Oracle is making progress, but it has a
long way to go," said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, vice-president for software
at analyst firm Ovum.
AMR analyst Nigel Montgomery said, "The big factor is that the
Standard Edition's architecture is the same as the E-Business
suite, so if you want to scale from one to the other, you
can."
Miles said the decision to price Standard Edition competitively was
very welcome but added that the application was not the big change
users were looking for.
"Application Server is now a robust product, but if Oracle is
talking about a pricing announcement, that is not something to base
a three-day conference around. There is not any important new
functionality in that it is a version of an existing
product."
Other big product news will be Oracle CRM 11i.10 - Oracle's annual
applications update will have new modules for sales, marketing,
partner relationship management and e-commerce.
Robert Desisto, vice-president at analyst firm Gartner, said CRM
11i.10 offers some advancement in partner relationship management
and advanced pricing functions.
He said users who have implemented Oracle Order Management should
consider Oracle Advanced Pricing but should be prepared to deal
with some early quality issues - which is the case with any first
release.
Desisto advised users to also ask their system integrators about
plans to use Oracle Partner Management. This is a tool built on top
of Oracle iStore which enables tight integration between
transaction processing for e-commerce and partner management
capabilities, such as lead management.
"Companies in manufacturing industries, such as high-tech,
electronics, automotive and industrial products will find the most
value from Oracle Advanced Pricing and Partner Relationship
Management products," Desisto said.
He added that product integration between the new Customer
Relationship Management modules is not as strong as it is between
the Oracle Sales and Marketing modules.
As for the forthcoming version 11i.10 updates to Oracle's other
E-Business Suite applications, such as Financials and Human
Resources, Oracle is expected to make announcements in September,
possibly at the conference, and release them later in the
year.
David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum, said, "The main problem
with the applications is that Oracle has allowed people to change
the source code. I anticipate that access to the code will be
closed off now because it is easy for companies that have changed
the code to move to another competitor."
A backdrop to the conference will be the impending decision from
the US Department of Justice about whether to allow or block
Oracle's hostile takeover bid for rival PeopleSoft. Pelz-Sharpe
said, "One has to hope for Oracle's sake that the PeopleSoft case
does not overshadow the conference. The question is, if it goes
through, can Oracle go ahead with it with all the bad blood?
Personally, I think it will."
Oracle's bigger picture
Users should not be deceived by the probable lack of news of
major products at OracleWorld, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Ovum's
vice-president for software.
Behind the scenes, the software giant is laying out a
significant new strategy, he said. "What Oracle is trying to do is
develop a fuller story around data management to include
unstructured data, records management and some things coming under
the banner of information lifecycle management. They have quite a
good story, but have not managed to articulate it well. That will
be the big story over the next year."
He added that as Oracle starts to add tools and features to
manage unstructured data, it will move further into markets
dominated by Documentum and Filenet, although it will quickly move
beyond just document management.
Pelz-Sharpe said there is already evidence of Oracle paving the
way for unstructured data management in its CRM application through
the use of analytics. "Applications can become so much richer. For
example, a CRM system could pull in letters and photos for
insurance claims and there will also be major cost savings," said
Pelz-Sharpe. "[Unstructured data management systems will mean] a
large cost to companies, but the savings are big - 80% of data is
unstructured and 60% of which is probably redundant."
Monthly patches benefit users
Oracle's decision to move to releasing monthly application
patches could prove to be popular with users because they will give
IT managers the ability to plan their updates better.
Oracle said, "We believe a single patch encompassing multiple
fixes, on a predictable schedule, better meets the needs of our
customers. Although it is challenging to produce all patch sets on
a fixed schedule, we are confident a regular patch schedule is the
right thing for our customers."
Oracle UK User Group chairman Ronan Miles backed this view. "The
family packs were too large for testing and the testing impact was
huge. Bite-sized patches make more sense," he said.
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