Oracle asserts edge in collaboration software

Can the last be the first?  

This question pretty much sums up what Oracle Corp. is and wants to be in collaboration software. Recently, it introduced its Oracle Collaboration Suite Release 2, fashionably late but with a few surprises.  

Oracle Collaboration Suite Release 2 now includes real-time technology for online meetings, instant messaging and co-browsing. It features iMeeting – a single, scalable real-time collaboration platform for Web conferencing, voice streaming, meeting playback, instant messaging and other online collaboration activities. 

Oracle’s approach is different from that of its competitors, making the database central to the collaboration software unlike the departmentalized and distributed multiple file systems architecture used by competing products. The beauty of the consolidated approach, Oracle says, is it drives down the costs of administration, software, hardware and migration. 

Armed with an independent market research, Oracle preaches that its new collaboration suite can save companies money by allowing corporate data to be consolidated into a single, unified repository.

Also, Release 2 can support hundreds of servers pooled in one, single infrastructure so that companies not only reduce their software and hardware costs but they also cut down their administration time and lower their support costs, Oracle officials say. 

Oracle cites a study by the International Data Corp. that claimed that an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $48,000 per week, or nearly $2.5 million per year, due to an inability to locate and retrieve information. Such information can be in the form of voicemail, e-mail and fax which can be accessible from one inbox using the Oracle Collaboration Suite’s time-saving features such as UltraSearch, which allows users to search for corporate information within all shared files.

Oracle claims that its own e-mail implementation saved it about $13 million in the first year of deployment, according to another research outfit iGillottResearch.  

To win converts from the Microsoft and IBM/Lotus camps fast, Oracle dangles two low-cost migration services. It offers the migration at less than one-third the usual cost to do it, says Chris Hummel, vice president for marketing and business development of Oracle Asia-Pacific.  

Citing the findings of Ferris Research, Oracle officials say the typical total cost for customers to migrate from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 to Microsoft Exchange 2000 is $100 per mailbox for corporations larger than 1,000 seats. With Oracle Consulting, which offers migration assistance from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 to Oracle Collaboration Suite, the cost drops to $29 per user. But Hummel clarifies that the $29 applies to customers in the US only.  

Oracle also announced a hosted collaboration service – Oracle Collaboration Suite Outsourcing – to relieve customers from time and cost responsibilities of system and management support. Again, Hummel clarifies that the direct outsourcing is done only in the US. In Asia, it’s handled by Oracle partners. 

Barbs flying

Oracle’s bid to capture the lion’s share of the market has fanned its already heated competition with Microsoft, which is confident of its lead in the collaboration area. 

Pressed by IT journalists to comment on the launch of Oracle Collaboration Suite, Kevin Hou, managing director of Microsoft Phils., says most enterprises today already have collaboration software installed so it will be hard for them to accommodate two collaboration platforms. 

"It’s not a new market anymore – it’s about six or seven years old – so it’s going to be quite a challenge for them (Oracle)," Hou adds. 

Mark Yambot, marketing director of Microsoft Phils., in a press event following the Oracle launch, reported that the product growth last year for Exchange Server increased by 80 percent from the previous year and 49 percent for the SQL Server.  

But Oracle is undaunted. While they expect companies to adopt only pieces of their suite at first starting with e-mail, Hummel says the response they got so far from non-Oracle Collaboration Suite users is very encouraging.  

Oracle officials at the recent launch were particularly keen to highlight how their collaboration solution integrates with Microsoft Outlook and other interfaces, so end-users don’t have to change their collaboration behavior. Hummel says such feature can immediately provide productivity benefits that can make people switch. 

Hummel points out that in July 2002, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect, was quoted as asking why his e-mail, voicemail and other messaging systems were in different formats and locations. At that time, Hummel says, Oracle already had a collaboration suite that handled and supported e-mail, calendar, voicemail, iMeeting, Web, fax, MS Outlook, wireless and other files in a database-centric architecture. 

Echoing what his chairman and chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, said during last January’s Oracle Application World (OAW) conference, Hummel says they were proven right by both Microsoft and IBM that the database is the best place to store data. "IBM said it would be the way two years down the road and Microsoft also admitted this is the way to go and said they will put Exchange in their SQL Server," Hummel adds. 

In his keynote presentation at OAW, Ellison said that "databases will hold everything… Even Microsoft said the future of Exchange is in SQL Server. The move is toward structured to unstructured, from exclusive to inclusive and to fewer and larger databases."

But IBM executives also predicted the same thing in an earlier interview with NetWorks. Tim O’Brien, digital media practice leader of IBM Business Consulting Services in the Asia-Pacific, says companies have started to address their rich media content management as an IT challenge, knowing how they don’t just need data management infrastructure anymore, but also information infrastructure.

In that interview, O’Brien adds that "audio and video files for corporate training, e-mails with large image attachments for presentation purposes, and other types of rich media content that embrace the IP type of environment, heighten the need for digital content management in the enterprise level. We can no longer separate alphanumeric data from rich media content such as HTML, XML, video for distance learning. Instead of just data management layer that needs to be utilized across an enterprise, now there’s rich media too that represents a new layer of content that must be enabled and made accessible in any way be it in database, browser or other means." 

What matters

When the dust settles, the industry hopes to see companies enjoying the benefits of the collaboration software of their choice. 

An early adopter of the Oracle Collaboration Suite Release 2 is Nokia, which last month announced a joint initiative to deliver Oracle Collaboration Suite on Nokia mobile terminals.

In a statement, Oracle and Nokia said they intend to develop a mobile solution for enterprise voicemail, e-mail, calendaring, file management and search capabilities to provide mobile workers with one source for integrated and consistent communication across multiple mobile devices and platforms. Program rollout will start in Western Europe and may be extended to the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. Pilot sites are planned for the second quarter of 2003, beginning in the UK. 

Global development teams from both corporations are leveraging Oracle Collaboration Suite and Nokia’s range of mobile phones. The Nokia 6800, along with the Symbian-based Nokia 3650, Nokia 7650 and Nokia 9200 series terminals, using Oracle Collaboration Suite Release 1, offers integrated e-mail, calendaring and contact management capabilities to the mobile workforce. With the Collaboration Suite Release 2, Nokia can add real-time capabilities to its other offerings as well.

Meanwhile, ViewSonic, maker of computer display monitors, is currently evaluating the implementation of Oracle Collaboration Suite to provide an enhanced e-mail and file-sharing capability to support its global operations.– Alma Buelva