Ellison outlines new Oracle era

By Warwick Ashford, ITWeb London correspondent

San Francisco, 22 Sept 2005

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has outlined plans for a new era characterised by co-operation and open standards in a keynote address at this week`s Oracle Open World in San Francisco.

Ellison addressed thousands of partners and customers who had stood for at least an hour in a queue that stretched a city block to attend his keynote.

In a marked departure from previous years, Ellison adopted a far more conciliatory approach, following all his top executives in reassuring PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers.

"We will provide support for as long as it makes sense for your organisation to be using those products," he said.

Freedom of choice

Instead of the characteristically scathing attacks on competitors, Ellison emphasised the need for standards and the importance of co-operation agreements between vendors to give the freedom to choose.

"Choice is a good thing, and Oracle would like to give you as many choices as possible," he declared.

Ellison said in the next 24 months, Oracle would be particularly focused on open standards, service-oriented architecture (SOA), security, business intelligence, automation and deep industry functionality such as specific database features for biotechnology.

"Open standards are extremely important to Oracle because they give customers choices," said Ellison. He explained that applications built on open standards easily coexisted with other applications built on the same standard, and middleware built on open standards enabled organisations to "hotplug" different components together.

"Sticking to standards has served us well because it has always served our customers well," said Ellison, pointing out that Oracle`s new fusion middleware is based on Java and Java-related Internet standards.

"Customers will be free to choose middleware components based on price, performance, security and internal policies. All those choices will be available because Oracle is utterly committed to the notion that we can build all our software based on industry standards."

No coercion

Ellison said SOA was another standard approach to building applications and adopting that approach would allow customers to pick non-Oracle applications, where necessary or appropriate.

"The notion of standards, SOA, Java and Internet standards, gives you choices in middleware components and applications as well as allowing you to preserve your investment in existing applications and components, making it easier to make choices in future," summarised Ellison.

He denied entering the application market with the intention of coercing customers into using Oracle`s underlying middleware and database.

"Although we`d love customers to pick our middleware and database, we think those components have to compete in their own right on price, performance, reliability and security."

In another allusion to Oracle`s recent growth by acquisition, Ellison said scale was important in the software industry. "As we grow larger, we are able to invest more money in grid monitoring and management, CRM, business intelligence and industry functionality."

While Ellison`s overall message was that a bigger Oracle in the wake of multiple acquisitions is a better Oracle, his uncharacteristically conciliatory approach seemed to indicate the new Oracle is at the very least more pragmatic.