Ray Lane spoke at the NY Oracle Users Group meeting yesterday. He was very upbeat. He spoke about how critical Oracle believes the internet will be for EVERYTHING, and about all of the Oracle "i" products, Server 8i, Application Server 4i...
He suggested that 50 years from now, looking back, client server computing will be viewed as computing's 1970's (bell bottoms, huge lapels, weird facial hair - love those sideburns - just a bit strange). It made sense at the time, but...
Oracle thinks Business On-Line will be huge; "raw iron", which Larry was not supposed to talk about at Comdex, but he needed something to counter MS Sql Server 7, will allow easy deployment of turnkey Oracle based applications; the PC has morphed into the NC, and besides, the whole point was NCA the paradigm, not the $500 box anyway; they really hope that someone takes the $1 million by showing Oracle is only 50 or 60 times faster than MS Sql Server (where have I heard that before? Oh, right, I posted that last week...), but Larry was still asked why the hell he wanted to piss off MS by making the challenge.
Some more interesting points:
NCI (Oracle's wholly owned Network Computer, Inc) has been signing lots of licensing deals for its software platform but is not saying anything about them. They had a big deal ready to go in NYC and when word got out, MS came in and undercut NCI by 50% on pricing. Anything you hear about deals with NCI now is initiated by the licensee. NCI will go public within a year.
Oracle has reorganized its sales force (end of last fiscal year) away from geographic areas and dropped the notion of "virtual companies" built around individual product lines. You had sales organizations so dedicated to their product that the Oracle end-to-end story never got pitched, and if you did get the pitch, it required a busload of people. Now, the sales organization is based on market segment, publishing, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, etc. This should enable customers to be presented with the whole Oracle picture instead of dealing with one organization for server, a different one for tools, etc.
Ray thinks that some remedy will be imposed on MS in the antitrust case. He thinks that it could be a consent decree, and expects that if that happens not much will change. One main concern is MS using revenues from its monopoly operating system to "bribe" people into using its other products.
I was very impressed with the man. Considering what a dismal job I thought he did at the Oracle 8i rollout where he led a panel discussion of ISVs who just said "Oracle is good. Java, java, java!", this talk was a complete turnaround. He took questions for about half an hour and gave straight answers to everything. He surprised practically all of the Group's steering committee with his opinion of the role of "Quality Manager" in a corporation (he doesn't like it, he views the position as a "conscience" with little power to change anything. Quality should come from the product groups and if a product manager feels the need to hire a "conscience", and has the budget, he/she should go ahead). Oracle's former Quality Manager was a good friend of the NY Users Group, and a direct report to Jim Abrahamson, Lane's predecessor. We thought he was doing a great job. When pressed by a member about Oracle support for Macintosh, Lane was brutally honest about how the Mac was slipping downward on Oracle's priority list, although an iMac with a browser is a great "NC". Lane did supply the name of a person responsible for Mac development to be contacted for detailed answers. He didn't dance around questions he didn't like (as Larry did) and told you when he thought something just didn't make sense. Yesterday's session is exactly the kind of interaction with senior management that Oracle user community at large needs. The Fortune 100 customers can probably get Larry or Ray to talk to them with just a phone call. An hour or so with a hundred of the rest of us is, IMHO, a great way to keep the developers and DBAs in the trenches informed and enthusiastic.
Now, let's see some good numbers posted...
-Michael |
