New Wares Add Teeth To Oracle Java Campaign

By ELLIS BOOKER

Oracle next week will marshal its forces to convince IT managers to push the envelope with Java-based distributed enterprise applications.

In a blitz of announcements, the company will launch its Application Server 4.0, a Java-programmable application server; its first Java integrated development environment (IDE); and a package of vertical applications re-engineered for Java. Although Oracle has been pushing Java and the distributed applications architecture it affords IT organizations, the company is only now starting to step forward with any quantity of deliverables.

Collectively, acceptance of Oracle's Java wares will be key to the company's success as it continues to push beyond its roots.

"The Java initiative will test whether Oracle can be more than a database company," said Tim Sloane, director of Internet Research at the Aberdeen Group, an industry consultancy.

Until recently, Oracle has been known for a product strategy principally aimed at getting new database customers or offering vertical applications to this installed base, Sloane said. The latest products attempt to break that legacy, he added. That said, Sloane did not think Oracle's marketing strategy or organizational structure is ready to handle the new direction implied by the products.

But Ed Schaider, an analyst with the Standish Group International Inc., disagreed.

"They found the n-tier religion and turned the corner 12 or 18 months ago," he said, arguing that the company may be able to develop its new, general-purpose server and Java-focused tools faster than it developed its database business.

"Oracle can realize an opportunity independent of its database products," Schaider said.

Holding center stage in this regard will be the Oracle Application Server 4.0, which enters beta testing next week and will be commercially available in the first quarter of ne xt year.

The 4.0 server is the latest version of the Oracle middle-tier server, which was introduced in 1995 as the Oracle Web Server. It will be programmable in Java and can directly interact with Java clients using the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP).

There are currently about 2,000 users of the server, according to Oracle.

Although the new server, as might be expected, offers specialized access into Oracle's back-end database, it also is being positioned as a general-purpose server, which can use any interface once it is wrapped in a standard Common Object Request Broker Architecture object, offered by Oracle as a "cartridge."

"There's nothing to prevent a non-Oracle package from working with this server," said Magnus Lonnroth, director of Oracle's Internet Application Server group. The server ships with Oracle-specific and general-purpose Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) cartridges.

Expenditures on application servers are estimated at $400 million this year, but will double by the end of t he decade, according to some industry forecasts.

The prospect of taking a leadership role in this emerging market led to two high-profile acquisitions last month: Borland acquired Object Request Broker (ORB) leader Visigenic--the two plan an ORB-based application server in the middle of next year; and Netscape acquired application server pioneer Kiva Software.

Oracle's Lonnroth said he was not concerned with these competitors, but was watching Microsoft and IBM, two other companies that compete with Oracle in the enterprise database arena.

Indeed, it is the database connectivity offered by Oracle's application server that seems to be the item that is drawing the attention of current customers.

"We have a large installed base of Oracle here, and when we first installed the server in September 1995, it was to get to that" database connectivity, said Brad Reisner, director of technology and development at Time-Warner unit Book-of-the-Month Club. Last month, the server software, which runs on a Solaris-ba sed server, handled the generation of 1.5 million dynamic pages, and Reisner expects it to generate 2.5 million this month.

The Java IDE to be launched next week is Oracle's packaging of the Borland JBuilder tool it licensed earlier this year. By the middle of next year, the tool will be interoperable with its flagship Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 tools. The three tools will be able to share a common repository, according to Oracle.

The tool will ship with an integrated debugger, JIT compiler, JSQL pre-compiler, Java Development Kit 1.1 and more than 100 JavaBeans components. Pricing is expected to be announced next year.

On the applications side, Oracle is expected to announce next week that its Oracle Applications suite--a collection of human resources, financial and manufacturing applications--will now run as server-side applications, accessible from Java-enabled browsers. Both Oracle Applications 10.7, the current release, and version 11, due next spring, will support Java access.

But Oracle i s not de-emphasizing its database roots, either. The company will make a few Java announcements relative to its Oracle8 product. It will announce support for both JSQL and JDBC in Oracle 8.04. Both Java interfaces, which let Java clients access databases, have been available to Oracle customers as beta code until now.