I just got back from the Oracle 8i event. It turned out to be mostly for ISV types, although there was also a press and analysts Q&A with Larry afterwards. The main message from Larry's presentation is that Client/Server is dead and that Internet Computing is the next and last paradigm as the computing industry matures. He kept repeating the Burger King story that is in his InfoWorld interview. His basic premise is that distributing data and applications to lots of small servers attached to LANs is bad. It's expensive, hard to manage and you have to build a data warehouse to re-aggregate data and answer simple questions like (Burger King example, with NT server and database in each burger shack) "How many burgers did I sell today?"
He said that all of the ERP vendors, including Oracle are doing it wrong. Multiple installations at various regional/national levels is dumb. You should have one centralized datastore for the entire global organization. Where it is does not matter. All you need to access it is an internet connection and a browser. This is where he sees it going.
Oracle8i has a built from scratch JVM and Java compiler in the DB. They have really efficient garbage collection and requires 50K-100K of memory per user. He wants to get that down to <50K. Says O8i can support 10,000 users per server.
O8i includes iFS, the internet file system. You drag and drop a windows file and it gets stored and indexed in the database. Same thing for IMAP4 e-mail. They have filters to read windows file formats and render the text in XML or HTML. You can also invoke the app that created the file and feed it the datastream from the database. They demoed this and it looked pretty cool. The demo app did crash and an IE4 splash screen showed up when it restarted (on an iMac). Larry exclaimed "what was that!?" Some of the problems with the demo were staged to show how you can just go in and make a fix and keep on working. There was not a whole lot of info to be gleaned from the demo, but it was fairly slick.
Larry sees the business model changing. He sees an ISV writing "doctors.com" or "lawyers.com" to handle the office management (scheduling, billing, etc.) for a doctor's or lawyer's office and having the customer use the app via the internet. The server is professionally managed and secured. The customer just needs a browser and internet connection to run. He contrasts this (about 1K startup cost for a new customer) with putting an NT server, database, LAN, etc. in your office and having to maintain it (about $50K to start). This is Oracle's vision for business-to-business services which they see as a much bigger market than direct sales to consumers. Large organizations with data-intensive operations will still maintain their own systems (example Dell), but he noted that many large companies have already outsourced their data centers.
In the Q&A when asked why NCA is not being mentioned, he said it is the same thing, "NCA" or "internet computing". He sees O8i and iFS competing with NT not SQL Server. SQL Server was described as a "tiny product that not too many people are on". He said that if Oracle took away all of the SQL Server business, it would not really do much for them, putting NT out of business is "too much to hope for", but we have a "moral obligation" to protect our children from the Windows interface <G>.
Most of the new stuff will be included with the DB and free, O8i, iFS, object support, email support. There will be a charge for the java compiler but it will not "hurt anyone".
All in all it was a very upbeat presentation. The stuff they are talking about is impressive. They also plan to give free development licenses to ISVs, so I suppose I can register and get some free software. I'm sure some nice quotes will come out in the trade press shortly. All of the questions in the Q&A were technical, although I did see name badges from Wall Street firms.
FWIW
-Michael |
