Oracle has postponed the delivery of a major update to
its Collaboration Suite until mid-2005, which will add instant
messaging and voice-over-IP capabilities, and offer content
management features.
Called Collaboration Suite 10g, the update will come as much as
a year later than originally planned. Oracle first indicated it
would ship the product in the first half of 2004, but later pushed
that back to the second half of the year.
Oracle attributes the latest delay to its work on the content
management functionality, which it said has attracted a lot of
customer interest.
"We delayed it a little so we can have a robust content
management offering as part of Collaboration Suite 10g," said Rob
Koplowitz, a senior director of product marketing at Oracle. "What
overwhelmed us was this immense demand for content management
functionality."
This third release of Collaboration Suite is intended to make
the Oracle product a stronger rival to Microsoft's Exchange and
IBM's Lotus Domino, which dominate the corporate e-mail server
market. Oracle sees its new content management functionality as its
trump card in the battle for customers.
"With Sarbanes-Oxley and a lot of other regulation, folks really
just want to get their arms around the explosion of data,"
Koplowitz said.
The content management functionality in Collaboration Suite 10g
is designed to help manage unstructured data. The functionality is
based on Oracle Files 10g, an update to the Oracle's file server
product, and will include policy-based document management features
such as automatic versioning, security and enforced attribution,
Oracle said.
By adding content management capabilities to Collaboration
Suite, Oracle is extending its competition with Microsoft to
Windows SharePoint Services. This could be an interesting battle,
because Oracle offers a centralised data repository, said Mike
Gotta, a senior vice-president and principal analyst at Meta
Group.
SharePoint allows users in an organisation to set up websites as
collaborative spaces. With increasing regulatory requirements,
unmanaged use of SharePoint can create concerns about document
management and records management, Gotta said.
Of the other enhancements in Collaboration Suite, the instant
messaging functionality is overdue. Industry insiders had expected
instant messaging to be part of the second release of Collaboration
Suite in June last year. Oracle's rivals Microsoft and IBM already
sell instant messaging products.
In Collaboration Suite 10g, Oracle also offers a new web-based
client, improved support for wireless devices and the ability to
integrate collaboration into an enterprise portal, among other
enhancements, the company said.
Oracle launched its offensive against Microsoft and IBM in
September 2002 with the first release of Collaboration Suite. The
product was updated in June 2003 to include web conferencing.
The supplier pitches Collaboration Suite as a cheaper and more
secure alternative for corporate e-mail, coupled with the fact that
it works with many user interfaces and offers certain benefits
because it is integrated with a common database. These benefits
include complying with regulations that require retention of all
kinds of electronic communications, the company has said.
"Oracle is sort of like the dark horse, they have potential,"
Meta Group's Gotta said.
Oracle said last year that it sold Collaboration Suite to 500
customers in the 12-month period until 31 May 2003.
In the six months after that it added another 250 customers for
a total of 750 as of 30 November 2003. The suppliers said it now
has almost 2,300 Collaboration Suite customers.
Oracle's Koplowitz said it is too early to detail pricing and
packaging for Collaboration Suite 10g.
Joris Evers writes for IDG News Service