Oracle is building a global division to offer businesses
products, services and best practices for Web 2.0
collaboration.
Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, speaking in London today
(9 May), said Oracle would be forming a
Web 2.0 organisation to provide businesses with
Webcenter, a new platform for building wikis, blogs and content
management for
Web 2.0 collaboration. He said, "Over the next few years we
will be building collaboration into our enterprise application
products."
The process for approving expenses is one area such
collaboration would work for business users, Phillips said. Web 2.0
collaboration technology could allow the manager to check a travel
expense with the travel agent directly, compare travel costs
against previous trips to the same destination and, if the person
submitting the expense was online, obtain further clarification
using instant messaging.
Phillips said Oracle was also developing a collaborative
platform that would take users beyond the functionality provided by
e-mail packages such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. "The
Beehive product we are developing we will be able to provide an
e-mail [server] and a presence-aware environment," which would
allow users to see who else was online.
Phillips said the product would remove the need for businesses
to run large server farms to support their Microsoft Exchange
infrastructure, as it would use
computing
grids instead of servers.
Separately, Oracle is also investigating how to make patches
update automatically, without requiring enterprise application
software to be restarted. Oracle's 11g product family has some of
this functionality built-in, but, Phillips said, "It is way too
hard to update enterprise application software."
If Oracle is able to crack this problem, Phillips hopes it would
be able to offer users continuous releases of its software, which
could simplify patch management and upgrading.