Oracle's Ellison promises shake-up

AN DIEGO, CA - The head of the world's second largest software company says corporate software applications have historically offered no value whatsoever to the senior executives who need them most.

"I don't use them," Larry Ellison, chairman and CEO of Redwood Shores, CA-based Oracle Corp., told a gathering of his company's customers at the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) gathering held here recently.

"In fact, I don't know any CEOs who use any applications, not SAP applications, not PeopleSoft applications, not Baan applications and not Oracle applications."

Ellison says he came to this "staggering" conclusion when he decided to get more involved in the applications end of Oracle's business and discovered he really didn't know that much about his company's offerings.

After asking around, he concluded that organizations get very little in return for all the time and effort they put into automating business processes and inputting information into their various information systems.

"I couldn't believe how strange these systems were," he said during an OAUG press conference. "I felt like Alice falling through the looking glass."

According to Ellison, however, Oracle's Network Computing Architecture (NCA) and the availability of his company's Applications Release 11 will "change the applications software industry forever," and offer a cure to the IT hangover caused by client/server computing.

"You all spend so much time and effort putting information into these systems, we're going to help you get the information out," he said.

Since January, more than 300 beta customers have gone live with Oracle applications running on NCA, a browser-based enterprise system architecture that copies the Internet computing model, which eliminates the need to install client software on individual computers throughout a corporate enterprise.

If you believe Oracle, NCA is simply "the better way" to run any application. In addition to saving time and money by centralizing software administration, the company says running applications on a server instead of desktops will dramatically improve network efficiency, which means "wide area networks (WANs) work again."

Applications Release 11, which only runs on NCA, includes Oracle's new Business Intelligence System (BIS), an intranet application that drills down into a company's various business processes to offer real-time reporting and analytical capabilities.

Using predefined queries, the BIS system "red flags" problems in areas ranging from inventory and cash flow to supply chain management.

Oracle's NCA announcement was received with cautious enthusiasm by analysts and OAUG attendees.

"Sometimes user groups feel more like victim support groups," said one human resources professional.

Another attendee, the data warehousing manager of a major North American software company, said only time will tell if NCA is everything it is supposed to be.

"We're certainly not going to be an early adopter. We'll leave that to beta testers who are given incentives to deal with the headaches."

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jul 1998
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