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

To: WTSherman who wrote (7075)	5/5/1998 9:03:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

To be even more specific - take a look at Oracle apps only vs. Peoplesoft. 6 years ago Oracle had a popular financial applications suite and had just released manufacturing and was a pretty strong #2 to SAP (who admittedly had a headstart with their R2 application from mainframes). Peoplesoft had nothing - just an HR application that was brand new. Now, look at PSFT vs. Oracle apps. Peoplesoft has a supply chain solution, investment in Ariba, everything... Im not saying psft is going to kill SAP but look at where they came from. What happened to Oracle?? Talk about lack of execution. Michelle

To: WTSherman who wrote (7075)	5/6/1998 9:47:00 AM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

Microsoft will not be able to drive down the price of anything other than workgroup and desktop database servers (which Oracle currently sells for less than $1500). SQL Server does not and will not scale to handle departmental and enterprise-wide databases, especially on NT. We are not talking about some power-user building a nice little "database" in MS Access here. Do you really think that companies doing millions (or billions) of dollars in business are going to run to Microsoft because they can get SQL Server for $800 instead of spending say $10,000 for Oracle. And how about support? Even with all of its faults, Oracle's support organization is set up to handle the needs of customers running mission-critical applications. Microsoft is set up to handle "How to I change the margins in Word" or "Why did your install clobber the DLLs needed by one of your other applications" from clueless end-users. If looking at a stock chart is a good proxy for evaluating a company's technology then I'm in the wrong business. My clients should be consulting their stock brokers when choosing which database solution is best for them. Like it or not, Oracle is the technology leader in the DBMS space. The companies that are going with apps from SAP, BAAN, PeopleSoft, etc. are still using Oracle as the back end database engine. Oracle will improve its applications business, they have to. And not by prettying up their ugly character mode apps, but by adding the missing functionality as the go forward fixing the UI. I agree that they have been doing a lousy job for the past couple of years. Anyone who thinks that Microsoft is going to displace Oracle as the leading provider of database servers is going to be quite disappointed. -Michael