Oracle UK chief claims NC concept survives

NEWS The days when Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, couldn't seem to speak in public without preaching from the gospel according to network computing are gone, but that policy wasn't a mistake. At least that's the view of Oracle UK managing director, Philip Crawford, speaking in an interview - published on Silicon.com today - about the software company's position on databases, services and network computers (NCs). Crawford says the network computer was "always part of a transition", more about accessing data than bashing the client-server model that has proved so successful for Microsoft and Intel. While admitting the PC is still dominant on the corporate desktop, he says users need choice, and that NCs are now in fact everywhere - in the form of PDAs, mobile phones, set-top boxes, and Internet-enabled PCs. The UK MD denies Oracle took its eye off its bread-and-butter database market - even though Microsoft made a strong entry into the market with its SQL Server product - as it promoted NCs. "Information should be available economically, reliably and securely to those people who need it," he said, claiming that before the NC push, those things weren't necessarily true. Crawford also reckons the company was right to back standards-based technology over proprietary, stating: "We could have stayed in the proprietary world and kept our margins higher... but no other industries, after years of development, are still based on proprietary standards." One way to stay profitable, Crawford concluded, is to offer both products and services, "as long as they're appropriate solutions".