Oracle Debuts New Collaboration SuiteOracle Debuts New Collaboration Suite

Oracle tackles real-time collaboration with the second version of Oracle Collaboration Suite, which it begins shipping this week, and it's pointedly aiming its sights at the Web-conferencing market.

The release, timed to beat Microsoft's impending Real-Time Communications Server to market and priced to take customers from IBM Lotus Software and WebEx Communications Inc., not only ties conferencing capabilities into the collaboration suite's assortment of tools, but does so by requiring only that the initiator of a conference be a licensee. Other conferencing tools and services generally require that companies pay for each conference participant--either through licensing or usage fees--so Oracle's approach could significantly reduce conferencing costs for its customers.

Oracle thinks conferencing is a technology that deserves to be more predominant. "It's in general use, but it hasn't had the widespread adoption everybody thought it would," says Steve Levine, VP of marketing for the collaboration suite. He believes the greatest interest in collaboration has centered on ad-hoc document sharing, and Web conferencing provides an ideal forum for large project teams.

Oracle hopes the cost of conferencing works in its favor. The company claims that its pricing--starting at $60 for a perpetual, named-user license, plus $15 each subsequent year for maintenance and upgrades--works out to about half of what Lotus and WebEx, the leading vendors of on-premises and services-based conferencing, respectively, can offer for a 10,000-user deployment. Levine says Oracle recently reached a milestone when its collaboration suite customer list hit the 500 mark, and he's confident that Oracle's conferencing tool--which also features real-time whiteboarding, desktop sharing, and chat functionality--will drive further adoption of the suite. "We wanted to extend into the real-time collaboration space and make that as pervasive as the other pieces of the suite," he says.

Other wrinkles in the collaboration suite include an E-mail rollback feature that lets users recover deleted messages without administrative help; a workflow engine for building customized workflows for individual project teams; and the ability to let mobile users pull data from E-mail, calendars, and corporate directories using their cell phones.