Oracle Corp will today unveil a roadmap for future mobile versions of its flagship database, which the company will port to numerous portable devices from handheld PCs to cellular phones. Denise Lahey told ComputerWire on Friday that Oracle’s vision is to bring applications and internet content to users of any portable device – be it a Palm Pilot hand held PC or a Nokia cell phone – over any network at any time. Although she declined to give specific product details prior to the announcement today, Lahey did say the roadmap would include a new version of the company’s existing mobile database, Oracle 8i Lite, which features new technology called Web to Go that the company first mentioned at its user conference in San Francisco last year. The 50KB database has been designed from ground up as a mobile database for laptop computers, and isn’t a cut down version of the full-blown server product, Lahey said. Under its Web to Go initiative, users only need a browser to access the mobile version of the database back at the company’s headquarters. So if a company wants to ship a new version of a software product to all its sales force, all it needs to do is send an email with the URL and then the users can go to the site and download whatever data, or sub-set of data they require, said Lahey. Beyond that, Lahey said Oracle would lay out its roadmap for a slew of mobile products targeted at embedded and personal information devices.
