Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (8477)	9/26/1998 4:34:00 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Respond to of 19079

IBD: 9/28/98 Oracle's Plan: Turn To Web For New Sales Date: 9/28/98 Author: Michele Hostetler Oracle Corp. wants companies to forget about buying bulky computers to run application software when just a Web browser can do the job. So the database software leader launched a hosting service called Business OnLine Wednesday. The usual way to use an application, such as financial services software, is to install it on each computer. But with Oracle's Business OnLine, companies use a Web browser and Internet connection to access their financial services software, which is stored in Oracle's data center. (See ''Hosts,'' this page). Oracle's president and chief operating officer, Ray Lane, recently told IBD why he sees a need for the service and how it works. IBD: What prompted Oracle to launch Business OnLine? Lane: There is incredible anxiety (among large computer users) from small companies up through General Motors with client-server computing. There's incredible anger and frustration with two-tiered, client-server computing. What (client-server) means is having your oftware) on the desktop and having your data in a server. That's the way applications have been designed for the last 10 years. The reason they've been designed that way is the customer wants to have a good user interface. The only way to do that is to put it on a PC. Now, with the . . . maturation of Java-based browser technology, we have the ability to provide the same thing in applications . . . without sacrificing a user interface. What will happen is that you've got 100 users using one copy of the application rather than 100 copies of the application existing on every desktop. The complexity comes down by 100 times. The manageability, the cost, everything gets better. And we have not sacrificed the one thing that the user wants, and that's the user interface. We've actually made it better. The Internet is simpler and more intuitive than using a Windows- based application. IBD: What's an example of how a company would use the service? Lane: Say we're a couple-hundred-million-dollar company and we have a financial department . . . which has 10 people in it. Those 10 people would simply subscribe to the service to get their accounts payable-receivable. Typically, the only way to buy that today would be to go to Oracle or SAP or PeopleSoft and buy software licenses, hire database and application support people, buy servers . . . put it into a data center and try to implement applications to support their operations. What the client-server vendors are doing, including us, is to make that process easier and cheaper. There are two ways to view this. One is that this is a new way to buy applications. The bigger story is whether this is the computing model of the future. That is, you buy application services like you buy your telephone services or your TV programming. We're the only industry that asks end users to get an electrical engineering degree to be able to use their computer. I think it is a natural maturation of our industry to see the application move back into the network. IBD: Will the service open up new customers to Oracle? Lane: No question about it. Today we have a sales force that's targeting the big companies. This will allow customers to investigate it themselves. Right now the hot market is the middle market - $500 million companies and down. We think this will expand the potential of dealing with these companies. I think it gives us great reach down to the middle-to-small companies that we otherwise wouldn't have. IBD: What are some of the top challenges in launching the service? Does Oracle have to overcome customers' reluctance to outsource their data centers? Lane: I think we'll be overwhelmed with demand. The challenge is that we have to prove that we can offer a service. We're a software company. We have for the last six years grown a professional service business to 15,000 people. So we understand more of the service business, but we've never been in the business of operating someone else's data center. So I think that's the biggest challenge - learn how to deliver service to a customer because we're taking full responsibility for it. IBD: Do you have any projections about how much money this could mean for Oracle? Lane: We haven't done any projections. I don't know why over the next five years this would not represent half of our application revenues. IBD: Who's signing up for the service? Lane: We already have a number of customer candidates. What we want to do is get several customers from the same industry as opposed to one customer from every industry. So we'll try to get a number of customers that will line up in a supply chain for electronics manufacturing, because we have a lot of electronics manufacturers already running on our applications. Sun, Cisco and Dell all run our applications. Much of their supply chain, such as Quantum and Seagate, run our applications.