By Rachel Chalmers
At an all-singing, all-dancing e-business partner briefing at its Redwood City, California headquarters, Oracle Corp has unveiled its iHost initiative, consisting of a software package and a set of services. iHost is designed to give businesses all the tools they need to become application service providers (ASPs). Mark Jarvis, Oracle’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, kicked off the event with a dig at the status quo: The MIS department is the headache, simply because of the complexity of the systems that they have, he said. As the internet changes everything, MIS can’t keep up.
The problem as he sees it is traditional client/server, with complex, proprietary applications distributed to employee desktops. The solution, clearly, is simple web-based applications hosted on centralized servers. Jarvis claims Oracle already has 100% market share among ISP-based application hosting companies. He says that market share among web application providers is almost as high, thanks to features like online backup. E-commerce companies that don’t have access to such features may be asking for trouble: barnesandnoble.com has never been backed up, he notes. Runs on a Microsoft server.
If the most appropriate software for e-business is Oracle 8i, the compete hopes the most appropriate software for e-services will be the Oracle 8i Hosting Edition. This will consist of the database bundled with the company’s own application server, directory and security capabilities. With it, Oracle believes independent software vendors can become ASPs. Because it’s nigh- impossible to guess how many users a web site will have, pricing for the package is on a power unit basis: buyers pay per megahertz on the server.
So is this just a neat way for Oracle to slip its application server into new accounts? Jarvis says the product doesn’t need any help. He claims that a forthcoming report from IDC will show Oracle’s application server as the market leader. That said, the database giant appears to have benefited greatly from confusion over Sun’s application server strategy since the AOL-Netscape merger last year.
It’s very difficult to take NetDynamics and Kiva and try to meld them together into one product, Jarvis acknowledges. I don’t know how much it’s helping us, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. IBM is facing similar problems integrating the varied technologies that comprise its WebSphere. So the application server business is perfectly healthy – but even so, the prospect of increasing sales for that product by piggybacking it on the database must have been almost irresistible.
Ironically, the trouble with Oracle’s iHost story may be that it’s too good. The company says it’s selling picks and shovels to the miners of the latest Californian gold rush. As any student of history will tell you, the grocers made the real fortunes. So, supposing you were an independent software vendor, why would you buy your tools from Oracle, when you could be making and selling picks and shovels to your own little customer base of hopeless dreamers?
