Oracle Corporation

Redwood Shores, California

Major Moves in 2000

Consolidates application and data servers and introduces Oracle 9i Introduces 11i suite of Web-based e-business, ERP, and CRM applications Says goodbye to Ray Lane; executive vice president Gary Bloom leaves to become Veritas CEO.

www.oracle.com

Larry Ellison is not the only person who works for Oracle. Yet, with Ray Lane, the former president, ballast, and chief operating officer gone since last July, Ellison seems to tower over the entire company, looming above Oracle's sleek office complex alongside Highway 101. Billboards blare out from the mudflats adjacent to the headquarters informing all that Oracle saved $1 billion in the last year, just as Ellison said it would, using its own e-business applications. Ellison proudly eats his own dog food, the billboard is telling us: and if it's good enough for me, it's definitely good enough for you, too.

Of course, a multibillionaire synonymous with the spice of life would never settle for a tasteless meal. Since Oracle 7, the database grub has been good and getting better. Given its large installed base, not all users are in step with the company's march toward the envisioned Internet architecture, but they are actively implementing every new feature for managing data warehouses, ERP systems, and growing e-business applications. The excitement surrounding Oracle 9i's unified database and Application Server suite centers on Oracle's Cache Fusion and Real Application Clusters technology, which will give database and e-business application architects critical new weapons to meet scalability and information latency challenges. As well, the system's reorganization and redefinition architecture, dynamic memory management, and recovery features will enable DBAs to meet the 2437 availability requirements of e-business.

Battling Best of Breed

In other words, with 9i, Oracle is finally putting meat on the bones of Ellison's Internet-only vision. Meat is critical for Oracle's user base to have a strong incentive to migrate more rapidly - and to seriously consider the all-Oracle notion of E-Business Suite 11i, upon which Ellison is counting for Oracle's future profit growth. It would seem that Oracle is going against the Internet grain by proposing a set of linked online application modules, all from Oracle, when best of breed rules the day. Perhaps based on his own unpleasant experiences with partnerships in the B2B arena, Ellison figures that businesses will eventually lose patience with finger-pointing and enterprise application integration problems.

By acquiring Thinking Machines' data mining tools and talking up deeper integration of its Express BI tools into the 9i database engine, Oracle has set the stage for some much-needed excitement in its customer intelligence applications. Cache support for real-time ECRM data analysis, sophisticated personalization, and e-business applications that depend on dynamic content for customer transactions come to mind. Without the performance constraints of bringing data through I/O channels to satisfy complex data mining queries, Oracle customers could perform instant "what-if" analysis. In tune with Oracle's billboards, Ellison just might be the first to try it, hard as it is to imagine him using data analysis to plot his flights of inspiration.