Oracle targets databases

As a chief executive who thrives on high drama and relishes the opportunity to take his victory laps, Oracle chief executive Mr Larry Ellison must have been deeply disappointed that approval for Oracle's PeopleSoft takeover came the week after Oracle's big annual conference in San Francisco last month.

Goodness knows the hostile approach to PeopleSoft was at the top of the question list for both press and the public gallery during question and answer sessions at the event. Or, as Oracle president Mr Charles Phillips said with trademark Oracle flippancy and an ear for quotable quips, "We never called it 'hostile' - we like to call it 'unsolicited'."

His responses at a press conference indicate how the acquisition will go forward, now that it has got an official thumbs-up. Oracle will support PeopleSoft products. It will continue to develop PeopleSoft products - as Mr Ellison verified in his closing keynote. But Oracle will not develop for PeopleSoft with as much focus and drive as it will develop Oracle products.

"Customers can plan on two separate tracks. The Oracle track is going to be the faster track, no doubt about it," said Mr Phillips at OracleWorld. Well, that pretty much lays out the strategy for customers of the PeopleSoft product line: make the transition to Oracle, or fall behind.

But as anyone who follows the Oracle story knows, all is fair in love and war for the company founded in 1977 by Mr Ellison, and still tightly, and often flamboyantly, controlled by the high-profile bachelor. The recent conference - which rolled together what are normally two separate events for customers and for application developers - is a case in point. With PeopleSoft bubbling along nicely in the background, Mr Ellison managed to get three company leaders, all of whom are rivals, to keynote on successive days: HP's Ms Carly Fiorina, Dell's Mr Michael Dell, and Sun's Mr Scott McNealy.

It's a testament - as is the PeopleSoft acquisition - to how powerful Oracle now is. With the PeopleSoft merger, it becomes the second largest enterprise software company in the world. That chief executive pageant at OracleWorld also shows how important databases are as the glue holding together everything from e-commerce to grid computing to the use of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags.

As the conference made clear, databases, once software used by big organisations and enterprises for their high-end computer needs, are now for everybody. Cheaper, more powerful computers from the likes of rivals HP and Dell (and even Sun's work stations are accessible to more budgets nowadays) have brought the power needed to run complex databases to even the small to medium company.

And that has made the SME (small to medium enterprise) the object of much wooing and courting at conferences like this. Cluster some servers from Dell, HP or Apple - also given some floor show profile by Oracle - and you, too, can run a database, was the message.

And that's the message coming from the MegaGrid project, announced at the conference, which teams Oracle, Dell, storage company EMC and Intel (all companies with a strong Irish presence). The idea for the project, which runs Oracle on Linux across low-cost Dell servers, is to find the best grid architecture for this particular mix of hardware and software.

However, clustering has been an Oracle focus for around two years now.

The real meat of the event was to be found not on large productions like keynotes, but on the supporting bony structure of the many mini-sessions and partner announcements.

For example, Oracle is eyeing up new areas for its 10g database product, folding in storage and content management as well as business intelligence. These features were previously supplied by third party providers. Now, Oracle is effectively cutting them out. Interestingly, the company is also offering its e-Business Special Edition Suite in modular form rather than as one large (and more expensive) package. This shift is directly targeting budget-conscious SMEs, said Oracle, which might want some functionality but don't want to pay for more than they need in what was a bundled product.

All these moves are meant to keep Oracle nimble in its long-running battle with Microsoft, which itself is in the database business, and also going after SMEs. Oracle wants to keep its products as low cost but high in functionality as possible - whether for SMEs or for large organisations trying to slash costs and maximise productivity - which for Mr Ellison clearly means getting rid of third party costs for customers.

But then, it's a cruel world - as Mr Ellison found out when his overtures to buy the San Francisco 49ers football team were rebuffed recently. It's a shame the team isn't like a public company, he said during his OracleWorld keynote. Then the shareholders could vote out the management.

As often with Mr Ellison, the quip had a double-barbed tip - pointing to a meeting in which PeopleSoft shareholders gave Oracle their support. Oh well, you lose some, you win some.