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July 23, 2001

War of the Words

Never mind warm and fuzzy coopetition: The rhetoric, particularly Oracle's, is fast and furious

By David Stodder

It could have been the setting for a prizefight. On June 7 in San Francisco, some 20,000 people sat arena-style in a circle around the JavaOne Developer Conference stage, which glowed through the darkened ballroom like a radioactive isotope. Enormous projection screens hung down from the Moscone Center's ballroom rafters, broadcasting the center stage events out to the masses. All that was missing was stale cigar smoke. Bill Coleman, the mild-mannered CEO of BEA Systems, was winding down his keynote presentation. "You've made us the Number One J2EE platform," Coleman politely asserted, "and I want to thank you for that."

Coleman had made his best case: Thanks to the supremacy of its WebLogic application middleware, BEA was ready to lead the Java community's great leap forward into Web services. Dismissing the .Net meanies to the north, Coleman declared, "This community has co-opted leadership in Web services." Fortified by enterprise Java, open integration standards, and robust software systems from providers such as BEA, enterprises could safely "future-proof" their businesses. "Well, I have not blown up," Coleman concluded, as he began his exit down the stairs. "That's more than I can say for the next guy."

Like a prizefighter with his retinue of handlers, the "next guy" entered the hall as Coleman and his people strode away in the opposite direction. On stage, Patricia Sueltz, Sun Microsystems' Software Systems Group executive vice president and steady Java diplomat introduced the next guy: "my friend, the CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison." Wearing his trademark black shirt and styled sports jacket, Ellison gave the audience a sly smile, tossed a few zingers at Coleman, and declared, "We're ready to compete for your business." Even from the dark hinterlands far from the stage, you could sense the fluttering nerves of Sun Microsystems' executives, who had been doing their best to depict the Java community as a loving, nurturing utopia of shared joy for genteel competition. "Hey, this is what open systems are about, right?" said a grinning Ellison. It was as though the big bad wolf had just dropped in.

TRASH TALK WARS

The crowd, perhaps a little stir-crazy after days of Java community sanctimony, was clearly energized by Ellison's bad-boy pose. It laughed, hooted, and cheered. Ellison came to discuss the "crisis of performance - the single biggest threat to the Java community." He stated, "Everyone wants to know: Can Java run as fast as [Microsoft's] .Net?" With the aid of Oracle chief marketing officer Mark Jarvis, Ellison set about trying to demonstrate how the "brand-new" J2EE implementation in Oracle's 9i application server ("we had a huge problem; we had to throw out what was there before") was just what Java developers needed to overcome performance problems. Ellison described 9i as a "tight, lightweight implementation."

Then came the benchmarks. Ellison offered bar graph after bar graph of Oracle's own benchmarks showing how BEA and IBM (Websphere) are "not even close" to Oracle's scores. "You can download these and run them yourself. If you can make BEA run faster, we'll publish it." Borrowing some rhetorical flair from tabloid TV, he blasted IBM's published Websphere benchmark results as wildly misleading: "This is shocking. I was asked not to make this presentation. But these are the numbers. It's really just shocking." As he has done since last fall, Ellison reminded the audience that IBM's record-breaking Transaction Processing Council (TPC) benchmark scores have been running with Oracle's DBMS, not IBM's own DB2. And as for BEA: "That's the whole benefit of an open platform. Just because you have BEA now doesn't mean you have to be on it forever."

It was a vintage Ellison performance. At this year's JavaOne, Sun seemed determined to tone down its usual anti-Microsoft rhetoric. There was no Scott McNealy keynote. To be sure, Sun president and COO Ed Zander, chief scientist Bill Joy, and other Sun executives weren't shy about portraying Microsoft's .Net alternately as vaporware or FUDware - that is, an ever more dangerous scheme by an evil empire bent on crushing developer freedom. But the company clearly wanted the focus to be on Java's positives: what's been accomplished in a mere six years, and how the table is set for an ambitious vision of things to come. The Woodstock vibe and Sun's generally muted rhetoric made Ellison's shamelessly competitive jabs land even harder. "It was just reality distortion," said an angry Bill Coleman at a group press conference later, which was not attended by Ellison or any Oracle representatives. "You don't win by making outlandish claims in the press."

WEB SERVICES: IMAGE COUNTS

With Oracle's 9i release, the company is finally a serious contestant in the critical application server arena. Sporting patented new algorithms and technology alliances with key partners such as Akamai Technologies, Oracle is taking a cache-infused approach to solving the performance challenges of both distributed database and application servers. Trumpeting its success, we can count on Oracle to run the familiar advertising campaigns featuring benchmarks, bar graphs, and those starkly favorable feature checkboxes.

But will this form of argument be effective in the age of Web services? As Sun went to great pains to communicate, an open systems community is about "coopetition": you compete on implementation, not on the standards - which is exactly, as Ellison noted, what Oracle is doing (and lest we soak up too much gentility here, Sun's implicit point is that Microsoft does the opposite). However, today's competitors may be tomorrow's partners, and vice versa. With rare exceptions, open, standards-based Web service solutions will, by definition, involve offering customers a suite of best-of-breed applications built on strong partnerships. Partners don't like to be trashed in public.

Oracle's strategic direction, of course, is to become one of those rare exceptions: the one-stop software solutions provider that does not depend on partnerships. This strategy has created an opening for competitors - IBM in particular - to chip away at Oracle's revenue-rich position as the preferred database partner for SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and so on. As if vendors weren't already hypersensitive to any potential damage to their brand, the coming age of Web services will only heighten their awareness. In a few years, we may be talking about a small number of big, branded IT solutions - umbrellas under which customers will find an array of Web-based services that could have been "manufactured" by any number of software developers. The services will come together via templates and integration architectures such as .Net or the open protocols maturing in the Java community.

DATABASES: MAKE WAR, NOT LOVE

To survive in such an emerging competitive landscape, Oracle will have to choose its battles carefully - and direct its competitive flames very carefully. Already, Oracle plays shrewd balance-of-power politics with hardware, storage, network, and select software providers in the IT industry. As long as they see Oracle's success as in their interests - that is, essential to their sales growth, particularly in our tough times - they will line up with Ellison. In fact, Oracle has used its strength to influence EMC, Hewlett Packard, Sun, and Compaq to engage in a "three-year collaborative effort," according to Oracle, to develop special features to enhance the performance of the 9i database's Real Application Clusters.

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The suddenly ferocious heavyweight database fight between Oracle and IBM is taking place against the backdrop of tremendous change to the competitive landscape. This bout has an almost retro feel to it: but make no mistake, this is not 1991. It is 2001, and the competitive landscape is changing fast. The rhetorical battles are only the beginning.

DAVID STODDER [dstodder@cmp.com] is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise.