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

To: lml who wrote (14946)	11/24/2000 5:07:29 PM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19079

Just because I have nothing better to do than walk right into a war zone, let me lob a grenade at both sides: It's the integration stupid! One of the most compelling arguments for using Oracle's development toolset has always been the tight integration with the database. The same argument extends to the applications. Oracle's apps are built using Oracle's toolset. That means that the apps automatically leverage all of the work that Oracle's tools development group has done over the years to take advantage of their knowledge of the underlying database. Is concurrency control an issue in the apps world. It sure is, but even a mediocre developer using Oracle's toolset doesn't have to know much about it because the tools take care of it for you. Want to move some of your business logic code into the database engine? Using Oracle's tools, partitioning application code is a drag and drop operation. Need to provide a Query-By-Example interface? Update a record without explicitly fetching the primary key? Display and synchronize records in a master detail relationship that is declaratively defined in the database (I just love foreign-key constraints)? Don't sweat it, Oracle's tools do all of that for you. No coding required, just click, click and it's done. So...If you've gone through the trouble of carefully designing your database (and we'll assume that the Oracle Applications folks have), all of that intelligence that you embedded in your database design is put to good use by the applications built using Oracle's tools. Integration, smintergration. I want best of breed! Yes, PeopleSoft has been doing HR apps (and SAP for ERP and Siebel for Sales/CRM) longer and are better at it than Oracle's Applications group. The other guys' software does everything I need and it doesn't require dealing with Oracle's flaky application server. Having Oracle's database engine managing the data is just fine (or I could use DB2, why should I care), since it's the corporate standard, but Oracle's apps?? Not in a million years. I can never find anyone to support them, and when I do, I almost grow broke paying for it. I want to go with the market leader. I can always find help, and at reasonable rates (well, reasonable is a relative term). Besides, I don't want to be left holding the bag when Oracle's applications business gets sunk because their database business suffered when their former applications "partners" steered all of their customers to other DB vendors. I could go back and easily poke holes in either argument that are big enough to drive a truck through. I was kind of superficial in my reasons anyway. The point being that for every customer there are different reasons for choosing a single vendor or multi vendor solution. Sometimes the reasons are technical. More often than not, they're political. Either way, I doubt that either of the combatants on the thread could articulate a compelling enough reason for going one way or the other that I couldn't shoot down (if I was so inclined...) Then again, what's compelling to my business (because I've got a whole boatload of Oracle developers) might not be compelling to yours (your IT manager used to manage a team of SAP consultants). I would suggest that the success on Oracle's applications strategy has more to do with how well they sell are able to articulate what THEY perceive are the benefits of a single-vendor solution than any technical details. I don't see Oracle going out there with the argument that their applications are inherently better than the competition's, regardless of the integration with the underlying database. If I can convince you that my strategy has unique benefits for your business, I can close the deal. On the other hand, I fully expect the other applications vendors to counter with the dual arguments of having better applications and allowing the customer to maintain some independence (and leverage) by having alternative vendors they can work with instead of being married to Oracle. I'll just retreat into my bunker now and watch the flames fly... -Michael