Oracle's Picking Fights With Collaboration 2Oracle's Picking Fights With Collaboration 2

SAN FRANCISCO--Let it never be said Oracle isn't ambitious. At its OracleWorld user conference here this week, the company is debuting a new release of its Collaboration Suite with real-time capabilities, saying it's serious about competing with IBM and Microsoft in the communication and collaboration markets.

Oracle also announced a new version of its Enterprise Manager systems manager, an update that will pit it against IBM's Tivoli and Computer Associates' Unicenter lines. Enterprise Manager 4, which can be used to manage Web-based apps from other vendors, will be available in the first quarter of 2003. The software will also have a repository for collecting IT system performance data.

New capabilities in Collaboration Suite 2 include online meetings and instant messaging. It already has E-mail, voice-mail, and file-sharing capabilities. People can search for information across the various media managed by Collaboration Suite. The software is expected to be available in the first half of 2003, priced at $60 per named user, and as a hosted app.

Oracle's going to have to get busy if it hopes to displace Microsoft's Outlook and IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino, which dominate the market. Oracle executives acknowledge that few customers are running Collaboration Suite in production yet--version 1 just shipped in September--and the vendor is seeing the most interest from its existing database, app, and app-server customers.

Customers who do adopt Collaboration Suite 2 will initially do so to reduce costs, by consolidating E-mail servers onto a single database, for instance, says Norm Weisinger, VP of the global Oracle alliance at BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting). But, he adds, the benefits can go beyond expense reduction to using the software for a range of activities such as collaboratively reviewing sales proposals.