Four months after being made into its own business unit, Oracle Education unit will this week announce that it intends to move beyond the corporate IT training market, which is already netting it $300m per year, to the lucrative worldwide education and training space. Oracle will begin by transferring and eventually developing training content to its open Oracle Learning Architecture (OLA) APIs. It will enable users to follow training courses residing on, of course, Oracle databases over the Internet using a Web browser. Beginning the first week of December, users will be able to call up Oracle to pay for a training course and be issued a password. They will then be able to access Oracle’s library of titles – 75 IT training courses to be gin with, growing to more than 1,000 by mid 1997. The APIs will be published sometime in the first half of next year and Oracle has already lined up a number of partners including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, MacMillan Publishing, and UC Berkeley. Oracle hopes to line up a good deal of OLA-based content, before it releases what will become its lead product, the Oracle Learning Architecture Player: an OLA server built to Oracle’s recently announced Network Computing Architecture specifications and comprised of a Web server, and Object Request Broker, and a database, all glued together with a custom-made user interface, PL/SQL code, and database model. The Player will be used to deliver and administer training software over corporate intranets or the Web. Because it will be built to open APIs, theoretically any vendor could create such a product, but Oracle is confident that it will succeed. It is, after all, creating this market. Senior director of marketing Bill Seawick says content is part of the strategy, but the idea is to seed the market with content and allow developers to develop on their own. The money will come from the player. Oracle also hopes to have its own authoring tool by next summer, but it has partnered with companies like Macromedia and Asymetrix so that product development can continue. Pricing for OLA training courses will be at about 50% of Oracle’s current computer-based training rates. Pricing for the OLA Player has not been announced, but it won’t be cheap as it is targeted towards the lucrative corporate intranet market.
