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

To: syborg who wrote (5665)	2/26/1998 12:09:00 AM
From: Bob Kimball	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

Any IT execs out there that would care to comment on the state of Oracle as a vendor?

To: syborg who wrote (5665)	2/26/1998 3:55:00 PM
From: Punko	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

>>Or you can try and play by selling an architecture (like ORCL) and hope others share your vision. IMHO it is better to provide open solutions which can play in many architectures. From the mktg stuff I've seen from Oracle, it looks to me like Open Solutions is exactly what they're shooting for. Their product strategy at every tier is geared toward using OMG standards. If Oracle accomplishes its goals, they will have succeeded in taking a huge load of complexity off the backs of MIS managers while leveraging legacy systems and opening their world to new applications. The complexity reduction will be done using - Java as the language for enhancing each tier (the client through applets, the apps server through apps cartridges, and the data server through data cartridges). They'll do this with a JVM in the apps and data servers. - IDL/IIOP/CORBA to enable seamless interoperability of distributed objects accross all tiers, regardless of language their written in. They'll do this with an ORB in the apps and data servers. Netscape has an ORB in its browser. - JavaBeans as the component model that will be recognized, also accross all tiers. OMG is working on enhancing this standard to open it up to languages other than Java, in which case it may be called something else. Even Oracle's ERP apps are being worked on to publish CORBA-enabled APIs, making future custom and off-the-shelf enhancements more re-useable and easily deployable. This vision is not yet reality, but if and when Oracle gets there, it will give IS shops the ability to standardize on a relatively small group of skill sets (Java/CORBA - both standard, non-proprietary technologies) and yet have the power to build next generation apps using the best operating systems and hardware for the job, while retaining access to their legacy data (IMS, VSAM, DB2, etc) and procedures (CICS, MQ Series) through their data and procedural gateway products. And if you have to use VB, ActiveX, or COBOL for that matter, you'll be able to use IDL wrappers for this stuff as well. The network computing strategy is very simple and elegant. Move business logic from the client to a professionally managed, scalable, reliable load-balanced Apps server , and consolidate the data (all kinds, traditional, multimedia, even spreadsheets and word documents) in a professionally managed, reliable, (hopefully) scaleable data server, while standardizing the skill sets necessary to make this all happen, allowing a given programmer to switch from client to apps server to data server duty with minimal training time. The biggest question is the ability of the back end to handle complex data. If it does this well, Oracle's very open, very flexible architecture will play extremely well in the enterprise for years to come. I think this will be tough year for them, though, because of product transitions, the vertical reorg, and the increased competition from other DB makers while Oracle continues to get its architecture in place.