Oracle upgrades collaboration tool to take on Microsoft

Oracle has announced enhancements to its recently launched Beehive collaboration software. The company has also slashed its entry-level price for Beehive by more than half, while announcing prices for a cloud-based version.

Oracle announced Beehive at last September's OpenWorld conference. It replaces the Oracle Collaboration Suite.

According to independent analyst Peter O'Kelly, Beehive represents Oracle's fourth attempt to crack the collaboration market, which has been long dominated by Microsoft and its Exchange and SharePoint products, and IBM with its Lotus Notes and Domino software.

Last updated in 2005, Collaboration Suite "failed to put a dent in the universe," O'Kelly wrote in a blog at Beehive's launch. SharePoint, meanwhile, has 100 million licensed users, according to Microsoft.

Despite its late entrance to the market, Oracle's senior vice president of collaboration technologies David Gilmour asserts that things will be different for Beehive.

"The market leaders are groupware products that have grown up," he said. "Collaboration was layered on after the fact, not designed that way in the beginning. Beehive is almost the complete inverse of that."

Gilmour was CEO of collaboration vendor Tacit Software. Tacit offered a cutting-edge "expertise location" platform that tracked employees' usage to build a profile of their expertise that could be found by other employees. Tacit was acquired by Oracle in November.

Oracle did not mentione an expertise location feature today. However, new features announced include "web-based team workspaces," which include wikis, team calendaring, file sharing and others built with enterprise-grade security and compliance, enhanced web and teleconferencing, and expanded compatibility with non-Oracle desktop tools, such as Microsoft Outlook email.

Not only can end users employ existing mail or IM clients of their choice with Beehive, but IT managers can continue to use Microsoft Exchange in conjunction with Beehive, Gilmour said. That can smooth over one of the difficulties associated with persuading large enterprises that have invested years and millions of dollars in Microsoft or IBM to migrate to Beehive.

Also, while "people hate switching, there are immediate hard dollar savings," Gilmour said. He reitierated that Beehive, which stores all data in an Oracle database, is more scalable than competitors.

"It is just way better when you're living in a real database," he said. "Everything is pretty complicated and brittle in Exchange. With Beehive, there are no hidden, strange 1GB store limitations."

SharePoint uses Microsoft's SQL Server, while Exchange uses the Jet database, which some users have criticized for not scaling well.

Oracle previously set Beehive's price for a one-time licence at $120(£80) per user, plus an additional 18 percent of that license per year for maintenance. In its announcement, Oracle cut the entry-level price to $50 per user. Components such as messaging and team collaboration, however, cost an additional $30 per user.

Companies can also deploy Beehive as a cloud-based service for $15 per user per month with as many features as they want, Gilmour said.

Author: Eric Lai, Computerworld (US) @ http://www.techworld.com

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Oracle introduces Oracle Retail Data Model

Industry-specific schema embedded with retail-specific analytics to help retailers gain intelligence into their business operations.

Oracle has introduced the Oracle Retail Data Model, a standards-based data model for Oracle Database, to help retailers accelerate their design and implementation of an enterprise data warehouse.

According to Oracle, the data model features a retail industry-specific schema complete with embedded retail-specific analytics to help retailers gain intelligence into their business operations, which is built for the Oracle Database platform including the HP Oracle Database Machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage servers.

Oracle claims that the model helps retailers make better decisions by providing advanced analytics such as forecasting out-of-stock situations, understanding hidden patterns for loss prevention, contribution and market basket analysis, product affinity, customer clustering and segmentation, halo impact and promotional lift.

Oracle has said that the model is designed to start data warehouse and business intelligence initiatives helping retail organizations realize a return on investment by reducing implementation time and costs. Furthermore, the solution's open, standards-based model allows for better integration with existing retail applications further reducing integration costs and complexity.
Ray Roccaforte, vice president of data warehousing and analytics at Oracle, said: "The Oracle Retail Data Model is the culmination of our efforts in combining Oracle's deep retail industry and data warehousing expertise and technologies into a comprehensive, pre-built and tuned solution for retailers. Oracle Retail Data Model offers customers a solution designed for rapid, predictable deployment and integration with existing investments to help customers save time, effort and costs."

Source: http://appdev.cbronline.com

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The Oracle open source credibility gap

Paula says open source executives are suspicious, and the unscientific poll I did here confirms it.

Oracle has an open source crediblity gap.

(Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, right, with David Lander, were part of a radio comedy troupe dubbed The Credibility Gap early in their careers. It must be true, I read it on Wikipedia. They are now touring as Unwigged and Unplugged with Christopher Guest.)

Fact is that many in the open source movement distrust Oracle’s motives in buying Sun and taking over such blue-chip open source names as Java, mySQL, Open Solaris and OpenOffice.org.

The fear that Oracle will seek to destroy these projects is real. And as with the swine flu, fear has consequences.

Just as Mexico is being pummeled because people fear a bug that has (as of yet) killed no one in this country, so Oracle is hurt by its open source credibility gap.

When Oracle bought proprietary vendors like Seibel Systems it could easily make up the $5.8 billion cost on the backs of Seibel’s customers. Their code, and support for their code, disappeared into the Oracle maw and, since most were fairly scaled, they had no choice.

Oracle can’t do that with mySQL. Any attempt to change the license or kill it through non-support would be immediately followed by a community fork, which in turn would probably be followed by entrepreneurs grabbing former mySQL committers and selling support for the fork.

Things would be even tougher with OpenOffice. A good alternative, OpenOffice Symphony, is supported by IBM, which even has a viable business model for the office suite.

Java was proprietary until a few years ago, yet dozens of companies had versions of it. Making it open source was necessary to tear down that Tower of Babel. And Glassfish?

Point is, Oracle is already being hurt by this community distrust. Where CEO Larry Ellison can feel it, in the wallet.

So long as Oracle does not make its intentions clear, and so long as fear exists that it intends to do Sun’s open source projects harm, support for those projects is going to diminish. The assets are like ripening fruit.

Until Oracle makes clear that it intends to fully support Sun’s open source projects, and by extension the open source movement itself, the value of those assets will be degraded.

Author: Dana Blankenhorn @ http://blogs.zdnet.com

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