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By Joey Gardiner, 4 February 2002 14:45

NEWS Larry Ellison's plan to persuade Oracle customers they should stick to one IT supplier to bypass computer integration difficulties has been slammed by his former right-hand man Ray Lane. Lane said the strategy - aimed at getting users' to buy wall-to-wall Oracle applications - was not realistic. Speaking exclusively to silicon.com, he said: "I just don't see this as a credible pitch - Oracle just can't do everything for you, and I don't know anyone who buys that message. "Fortune 1000 companies are simply not going to adopt Oracle across the board." He added that an industry in which it is easier to buy all your products from one vendor because integration was so difficult was an industry in a sorry state. "If this is the case then basically we're saying we've failed as an IT industry," he added. Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison claims IT integration problems are the bane of users' lives, and has said the strategy of buying best-of-breed apps from different vendors is rarely successful for that reason. Ellison said users can buy their entire computing environments from Oracle. However Lane countered this view: "Oracle's CRM software and its ERP applications don't even work together - they don't talk - so even in its own terms the argument is wrong." Lane said the reality in the industry was that heterogeneous computing environments are the norm, and that this just meant integration had to get better. Ray Lane joined Oracle in 1992, quickly becoming Ellison's right-hand man, and was widely credited with turning the company round after customers lost faith in the early 1990s. However, in 2000 he was forced out after personal and strategy differences with the uncompromising Ellison. On his departure Oracle's share price fell 14 per cent in a week. Differences over the best-of-breed approach versus Oracle's one-size-fits-all mantra were part of the split, he said. Lane is now chairman of integration software vendor SeeBeyond, as well as being a general manager at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Phil Wood, marketing director at Oracle, said the comments were "unsurprising" coming from Ray Lane as well as being three years out of date. "Oracle does accept that users can't get absolutely everything from us - there is always some integration involved. What we're talking about here is minimising that as much as possible. "The best-in-breed approach, where you spend all your energy integrating and coping with the different development life-cycles of different product, just isn't the right strategy."