Agenda Setters: Ellison talks up centralised computing

NEWS Larry Ellison, CEO, chairman and founder of Oracle is one of the most theatrical personalities in the IT industry. Along with Sun's CEO Scott McNealy, where he goes, controversy follows. In this week's Agenda Setter interview, we take a look at Ellison's views on Microsoft, next generation wireless technology and his vision of centralised computing. In a press conference in London last month, Ellison claimed companies will shy away from deploying smaller Windows NT servers around their organisation, and instead will go with "economies of scale," and move towards centralised application and computing services. "The Internet is its first mass implementation of economies of scale. So there will be no movement to have Windows everywhere. Little Windows NT servers in small businesses and bank branches will never happen. It will never happen. The labour costs are prohibitive. Worse than the labour costs - the data fragmentation costs if you're a big business. Distributing data to thousands of little servers will be a huge mistake." Ellison is confident, however, that his own company will be able to ride the sea of change and transform his company to fit the e-economy despite a fall in quarterly figures. "One person's stability is another person's stagnation. We are going through a traumatic change from being a business to being an ebusiness - from a company that's organised by country to a company that's organised globally. So we are making a lot of difficult changes in our business and I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of stability. I think there are positives and negatives," he said. To see more on Ellison's views, you can see the full Agenda Setters programme in our Knowledge Management Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a33780 ).