The received wisdom is that Oracle Corp’s financial year, which began last month, will depend largely on whether it can stimulate its applications business and halt a sliding market share. But Oracle is still very cagey about its applications business. Last week it was supposed to have thrashed out a new plan to win the big six integrators and consultants over to selling and supporting Oracle Applications, but has so far declined to talk about the strategy. In any case it’s currently more content to swipe at the enemy number one, Microsoft Corp – if we assume Sybase Inc and Informix Software Inc are minor distractions – which has been making headlines with a beta version of its next-generation SQL Server 7 product, and tub-thump for Oracle 8’s advantages (see Top Story). The first six months of Oracle’s last financial year saw database growth slump to around 4.5% but in the last quarter database licenses were up 13% worldwide, 24% in the US. Oracle says the worst of the Asia Pacific crisis is behind it, the salesforce has been overhauled and that a distracting focus on vertical application solutions has been lifted. Contrary to prevailing analyst opinion of the last eight or 12 months the database business is not drying up, Oracle said. Having shipped an 8.0.5 cut of its database last week, which includes support for additional 64-bit environments including, Oracle has been busy putting up as much chaff as it can about the forthcoming ‘Emerald’ release, Oracle 8.1, to head off the publicity around SQL Server 7 beta. Oracle is waving the latest Dataquest numbers just as hard as it can. They show that Oracle has a leading 27.1% share of the entire database market, the first time it has surpassed IBM Corp, which controls 26.7%. It claims 42% of the NT market and 60% of the Unix market.
