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

To: alydar who wrote (16120)	8/31/2001 10:01:50 AM
From: Michael Olin	Respond to of 19079

I can't say much about 11i because I don't work in the applications area. I almost exclusively work on the architecture and development of custom-built systems clients in a wide range of industries. The common denominator is Oracle, not the type of company (I have done a lot of work in the pharmaceutical industry, but that is more indicative of the type of large Oracle shop that is located in metro-NYC, not any particular preference of mine). Although it may seem a bit strange, especially based on what makes it to the mainstream media, there are several, often separate, groups of Oracle users. There are the pure applications folks. They buy Oracle as a solution, ERP, CRM, whatever modules they need. Then there are the people who buy Oracle as a back end for someone else's application, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. Finally, there are the Oracle development shops. They buy Oracle for the RDBMS engine and build their own custom applications. They may use Oracle's tools (Oracle Developer, JDeveloper, 9iAS) or some other vendor's tools, but they are spending a lot of time and money to build their own systems. I see lots of shops that are combinations of the these types. Many companies that have built their own applications with Oracle as a back end will purchase a third party ERP (or CRM or manufacturing, or stock trading...) application that runs on Oracle since they have standardized on that as their database platform. I think there is less of a base of companies that had Oracle in place as a standard DB platform and then bought Oracle's applications than bought someone else's applications. I'm just guessing here, so anyone with better information feel free to correct me. Many companies that buy applications that run on Oracle continue to do their own custom development using Oracle since they already have their corporate data there (a no-brainer, you would think, but I have seen MANY shops where they will not allow two Oracle-based systems to talk directly to one another and instead extract data as flat files from one system and load it into the other. And no, security is NOT an issue if you do it correctly, but moving flat files around the network... How many shops encrypt or otherwise secure that data?). I will have more to say about 9iAS in the next month or two. I have two clients with existing OWS (the "old" Oracle Web Server product) installations that have to be migrated to 9iAS, one on Solaris and one on (ugh) NT. I'll let the thread know what happens with those migrations and what I think of the product. Personally, if I needed just one module, I would go with best-of-breed. But who needs just one module? I have been through the trials of trying to build an application which integrates financial data in SAP, HR data in PeopleSoft and research data in an internally developed application. All three use Oracle as their repository and it is just hell to integrate the data (see my parenthetical comment about flat file data transfers above). You usually end up with separate groups responsible for each system, separate IT people responsible for maintaining the system and no chance of being able to leverage the fact that the data is all accessible from a single place (the Oracle engine). Because I believe the value of integrating ALL of your data will generally outweigh the difference in features between the best-in-breed and the suite product, I would lean towards the suite. We can also discuss the relative merits of installing an application and changing your business practices to fit (as Larry Ellison suggests) or spending millions customizing (and breaking) the application to conform to your practices (as I've seen almost everyone do), but that is quite another discussion. Of course, I'm working on a product now that eliminates the need to make that choice, but that is yet another discussion... Just my thoughts, Michael