Oracle Corp’s new division set up last year to explore new technologies said that telecommunications was one of the first areas of interest, and good as its word, on May 11, it will announce an alliance with US West Inc aimed at providing a variety of electronic services to business, schools and homes, including mail and voice messages, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper hears that Oracle will supply technology to manage large pools of messages and data and link together at least 1m electronic customers, and US West will provide marketing muscle, a large customer base and communications skills. In an interview last month Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said that technical advances now make it possible to create relatively inexpensive public databases, with telephone companies acting as the backbone for what he termed a huge emerging market, enabling subscribers to store and recall voice messages and receive what he calls home mail electronically, and that by matching the latest parallel processors with Oracle’s software, new data services could deliver information at a tenth the current cost.
