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Oracle Changes Strategy, Embraces App Integration

Posted on: Saturday, 7 February 2004, 06:00 CST

Midyear upgrade will include built-in hooks to homegrown systems and rival packages

Oracle Corp. last week detailed changes it's making to regain the No. 2 spot in the business applications market, including a newfound enthusiasm for helping IT managers tie its software to other systems.

The integration push is a shift in strategy for Oracle, which fell behind PeopleSoft Inc. in the business applications sales race when PeopleSoft bought J.D. Edwards & Co. last summer. Until now, Oracle officials had lobbied hard to convince users they should install monolithic systems combining the company's database, applications and application server software.

But at the vendor's AppsWorld conference here, Oracle previewed a planned upgrade of its E-Business Suite lli applications that will include enhancements designed to simplify integration with homegrown and thirdparty software. It also released a set of tools that can be used to pull customer data from 11i and other systems into a single repository.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison downplayed the idea that his company is shifting its stance on integration to recover market share, claiming that it's about even on sales with PeopleSoft. "We're not giving up on what we were saying before," he said during a press briefing. "[But] not everyone in the world wanted to go that way. We've got our fair share of wins. Now we live in a heterogeneous world."

Basheer Khan, a member of the independent Oracle Applications Users Group and senior director of the Oracle practice at consulting firm Vertex Systems Inc., said the integration hooks that Oracle is adding to its applications represent a big step forward.

"In the past, they've been going after customers to sell them the whole E-Business Suite, but they've realized some customers have invested a lot of money in other technology," Khan said. Los Angeles- based Vertex itself plans to install Oracle's financial applications later this year to replace homegrown software.

Making integration easier by providing built-in hooks to other applications offers obvious benefits to users, said John Graff, vice president of marketing at National Instruments Corp. in Austin. "Looking at it at the outset, it seems to make sense for Oracle to do this," Graff said. National Instruments runs the marketing and telesales modules in 11i, plus other Oracle applications.

Oracle, which is still trying to buy PeopleSoft via a hostile takeover bid, has seen the integration light relatively late compared with some of its top business application rivals. Market leader SAP AG has vigorously promoted its NetWeaver middleware technology for the past two years, and PeopleSoft last May announced a plan to build connectors into its applications. CRM vendor Siebel Systems Inc. has made a big integration push with its Universal Application Network tools. Chuck Phillips, one of Oracle's two presidents, told reporters the company already offers integration technology for 11i "but didn't package it as much as we could have."

That's due to change with Version 11i.10 of E-Business Suite. Oracle said the upgrade will make hundreds of integration hooks available as Web services, provide a repository of its application programming interfaces and support standard interfaces defined by Open Applications Group Inc.

The upgrade, which is scheduled to ship by midyear, will also leverage adapters and other integration tools built into Oracle's upcoming Application Server 10g software.

Likewise, the new Customer Data Hub software will work with the application server to pull information from packaged applications other than Hi. The hub extends Hi's underlying data model so it can support mixed software installations and ones that don't include any of Oracle's applications, company officials said.

IHOP Corp. plans to go live with Customer Data Hub in March, said Patrick Piccininno, vice president of IT at the Glendale, Calif.- based restaurant franchiser. IHOP wants to tie together its systems, which include ERP software from Lawson Software Inc. and various Oracle applications, to get better information about customer spending habits.

"We have four or five views of what the customer looks like," Piccininno said. "We're trying to drive to a single source of truth with this."

The integration about-face shows that Oracle has become "much more grounded in the reality of today's systems," said David Dobrin, an analyst at B2B Analysts Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. But, he added, "Oracle is slowly, slowly losing ground against its competition, both in mind share and market share, and it does not appear that the tide has turned." 44431

Oracle's Integration Plan

E-BUSINESS SUITE 11i.10:

* Exposes more than 800 "integration points" as Web services to facilitate links to other systems.

* Adds a repository that catalogs the APIs published by the company for the software.

* Includes native support for more than 150 business-object interfaces created by the OAG.

* Provides increased support for industry-specific integration protocols, such as RosettaNet and HL7.

CUSTOMER DATA HUB:

* Consolidates customer data from Oracle's applications and other systems into a single repository.

* Provides real-time data access to information without requiring users to move the information to a data warehouse.

* Includes data quality tools for use in developing, formatting and maintaining customer databases.

Online

Oracle sets up vocacy group.

QuickLink 44466

DATABASE FIGHT

Oracle hopes the price of its new 10g database will help it take on Microsoft in the Windows market:

QuickLink 44394

www.computerworld.com

BY MARC L. SONGINI

SAN DIEGO

Copyright Computerworld Inc. Feb 2, 2004

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