During his keynote address at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference held here, CEO Larry J. Ellison outlined his company’s major initiatives in the next two years that will help ensure the software giant’s market position going forward and eventually help wrestle the crown from rival German software firm SAP for the top spot in the software applications market.
Mr. Ellison summed up Oracle’s business strategy in the next 24 months into five main areas — open standards, security, business intelligence, automation, and industry functionality.
The Oracle CEO highlighted the importance of building new software based on open industrystandard technology such as Java in order to give customers a choice in the open market to choose the best technology suited for their organizations rather than being locked in to proprietary technology. "So long as we build our products, which we are doing, you should be able to unplug our Java container and plug in an IBM Websphere Java container," he said. "You should be free to choose whatever Java engine you want to use."
In view of its slew of acquisition of 10 software companies in the last 10 months, Ellison said Oracle is focusing its plan in making its Fusion middleware support industry standards and work with other products, notably open-source software and IBM’s WebSphere Javabased middleware.
However, he said that the company’s decision to support IBM’s DB2 database on its Fusion middleware would have to be decided after a long careful process.
According to Ellison, Oracle is currently talking to PeopleSoft customers and others about whether their priorities are portability or the extra security and performance, which he thinks they’d be getting if they migrate to Oracle database software. "Right now it’s a coin toss (as to what Oracle will do)," said Ellison.
Analysts believe that it’s an important issue that Oracle needs to address given that that the company has inherited a huge number of DB2 users via its acquisitions of software firms PeopleSoft, Retek and Siebel.
The second key area in Oracle’s business strategy that Ellison indentified is security.
He said security remains to be at the core of all new Oracle technology, as it has been for almost 30 years.
Mr. Ellison said security has been very important for Oracle from day one, and now, as more companies make their enterprise applications available for customers and partners on the public Internet, as well as employee access systems from home over the Internet and from branch offices, the security risks are increasing. "It’s the No. 1 issue today, it will be the no. 1, 2, and 3 issue tomorrow," he said.
He added that Internet growth, along with new technologies like VoIP, are increasing are further contributing to the security risks. Ellison warned that companies need to be careful in their implementation of the Internet phone call technology which he said allows "malicious people" to shut down or intrude on a company’s voice network.
Among other initiatives, he said Oracle will be very focused on is intrusion detection technology and strategies, as well as identity management, as he stressed that Oracle is the only applications company that is doing a comprehensive job with security. "When was the last time anyone remembers an Oracle database was broken into? It was more than 15 years ago," Ellison asked.
In the area of business intelligence, the Oracle CEO bared plans to put more emphasis on business intelligence in the light of prevailing IT strategies that disconnect business intelligence from efficiencies traditionally associated with business software. "The industry has built applications with a central focus on process automation for a long time, but business intelligence has not been built around the process. They have been in two separate worlds until now. This has to change," Ellison said.
He explained that joining these systems allows managers to know more about what their organizations are doing - not just automating purchases, but knowing if they put them over budget; not just tracking service requests, but comparing them to customer adoption to know if products are getting better. "Let people know what’s really going on so they can adapt their behavior accordingly.."
In the area of IT automation, Ellison said that it should not be limited to applications and stressed Oracle’s has an advantage over it’s competitors. "When we adapt our products stack for your particular needs, we don’t adapt just the applications. We adapt the applications, and the middleware, and the database to meet those needs," he said.
Lastly, Mr. Ellison said the company would also be working on developing industry functionality for its products in light of the acquisition of industry-specific companies like Retek for retail and i-flex for banking. He added that Oracle has developed applications for the pharmaceutical industry and also changed its database to serve the biotechnology industry.
