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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: WTSherman who wrote (12220)	10/13/1999 10:11:00 AM
From: Sarkie	Respond to of 19080

Pointclick.com Relies On E-Commerce Hosting Oct 12, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- People who wonder why on earth anybody would use an application service provider might consider the tale of Pointclick.com, a rewards-type Web service that went from concept to creation in under nine weeks. The premise behind Pointclick.com is simple: Reward consumers for surfing the Net, charge advertisers money for sending surfers their way, advertise to the growing user community, and reap the rewards on both ends. The idea is so simple that when the Pointclick.com people finalized it in mid-July, they felt panicked to bring it to fruition before someone else did. The major hurdle in bringing the company online was in creating the complex transaction system that would monitor and record the surfer's hits and determine who owed money to whom. The hardware, software, and employee talent that can create an infrastructure like that takes money, which the fledgling Pointclick.com didn't have. The company also needed to build up the partnerships and a community of customers to lure partners. It seemed like a double bind. That's when the company turned to Oracle Business OnLine. "We rent their equipment and rent their engineers monthly to monitor the applications, to monitor the servers, to make sure we have the scalability and data backup services," said Craig Brown, chief technical officer said. The biggest issue was who would control the development, Pointclick.com or Oracle. "They won't just set up the servers and let you put the software on it," Brown said. Oracle wants control because it has to maintain those systems, he said. "It's hard picking up and trying to make something work that someone else did," Brown said. Pointclick.com also relies on a Web hoster to house its Web servers. To hook the sites together, Oracle set up a VPN to tie together Pointclick.com's Salt Lake City headquarters with the hoster in Ogden, Utah, and Oracle's site in Redwood Shores, Calif. Oracle Business OnLine is slightly different because Pointclick.com isn't actually renting the Oracle Financial Suite app but the servers, network connections, and engineers. So far, it is using the accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general ledger modules from the financial suite.