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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 15, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 37
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Special Features:
ORACLE TAKES ON IBM WITH NEW GRID
STRATEGY
Oracle Corp unveiled the latest version of its flagship database product,
which is designed to stitch together disparate computer systems and take on
rival IBM.
During the No. 2 software maker's annual U.S. OracleWorld conference, which
ran last week in San Francisco, executives introduced Oracle's new 10g
database, with enhanced features to support "Grid computing" by pooling
servers and storage into a unified system that provides up-to-date business
information.
"This is a key milestone in our battle with IBM," Executive Vice President
Charles Phillips said in a break-out session with reporters.
Phillips, who was Morgan Stanley's star software analyst prior to joining
Oracle earlier this year, said the technology announcements are "a culmination
of our strategy. These are things we've been working on for a decade."
IBM unseated Oracle as the overall leader in total new database software
sales
with its acquisition of mainframe database vendor Informix in 2001. The
company, along with Microsoft Corp, has also been making gains at the low-end
of the modern database market that Oracle has dominated.
Further, IBM played a pivotal role in creating the Grid, or "on demand,"
computing concept, which has been adopted largely by government agencies and
academic researchers.
In recent months, hardware and software makers such as Oracle, Sun
Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co have embraced Grid computing with the
hope that budget-conscious big corporate customers will jump on the band wagon
and start spending again.
Some analysts charged that by changing the platform upon which many
business-
management software programs run, Oracle is giving itself an opportunity to
offer Grid-enabled software for automating such things as accounting,
purchasing and human resources far ahead of competitors like SAP AG and
PeopleSoft Inc, which Oracle is trying to acquire via a $7.3 million hostile
takeover bid now being reviewed by antitrust enforcers in the United States
and Europe.
"It gives Oracle an inherent technology advantage in the Grid environment,"
FTM Midwest Research Senior Analyst Trip Chowdhry told Reuters.
Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting,
disagreed.
"It just wouldn't make sense for them to use 10g for gaining an advantage
over
their applications competitors. Doing things that favor applications over the
database is counterproductive," Greenbaum said, noting that most of Oracle
revenues come from its database business.
Oracle also unveiled 10g versions of its application server and enterprise
manager software.
Among other things, the company's new products will offer improved
automated
management features, integration capabilities and clustering technology, which
allows users to tie servers together so they can handle more transactions and
data volume without slowing substantially or failing.
Pricing and availability will be announced later this year, Oracle
said.
Separately, an IBM executive was quoted as telling the Financial Times in
an
interview published online on Monday that a successful takeover of PeopleSoft
by Oracle would hamper competition in the applications market.
An IBM spokesman declined comment on the remarks attributed to Buell
Duncan,
general manager of developer relations at IBM.
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