Larry Ellison CEO of database giant Oracle Corp used his company’s OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco to reiterate, his company’s commitment to the internet as the future of computing. In a keynote that had a more than familiar ring about it, Ellison predicted that users switching to an internet- based computing architecture could cut their costs by a factor of at least five. Bold claims, especially given that Oracle wasn’t even prepared, at this the formal launch of Oracle 8i no less, to release any pricing details for its new software. For those of you who have managed to escape the centralization of complexity internet model versus lots of little servers everywhere argument, Ellison’s argument goes something like this. The days of three tier client/server computing are over. The old method of having a large number of little servers distributed everywhere is too difficult to manage to and too expensive to run. Instead, users should move back to a more mainframe-based approach by putting all their data on a small number of large servers. Users then access the data via standard desktop browsers, from anywhere in the world. This, said Ellison, centralizes the complexity, substantially reduces costs and makes wide area networks work more efficiently. Convincing arguments, but the widespread adoption of this type of computing will require that users rip out their IT infrastructure and start again at a time when most organizations are more concerned about an impending Year 2000 computer crisis, EMU conversion and a general meltdown in global economies. But Ellison does make another argument. He says the chronic shortage of labor skills will be the biggest single factor forcing businesses to shift to an internet-based model. Most large organizations have massive IS departments and the continuing squeeze on staff is making it even harder to manage distributed systems, he says, moving to an internet architecture only requires a small number of large servers and therefore a small number of IS professionals to manage them. And it also cuts the costs of buying and distributing applications, he continues, the cost differential is stunning. It’s literally $50m versus $10m. Think of email applications. Now it costs around $500 per user per year. We can do it you for around $100 a year, and services like Yahoo can do it for free.
