By Alorie Gilbert, 29 January 2004 08:55
NEWS Relaxing his purist stance on one-stop-shop software, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said on Wednesday that it's alright for companies to use Oracle's business system in conjunction with those from rivals Siebel Systems and SAP, and Oracle will even help them to do it.
Ellison's message, which he delivered during a keynote speech at Oracle's AppsWorld Conference in San Diego, built on the central theme of the conference: software interoperability.
It's also a marked change from earlier speeches, in which Ellison routinely admonished businesses against stitching together applications never meant to work together.
"Go ahead and keep Siebel for sales if you want to," Ellison said.
Ellison used much of time on stage to promote Oracle's Customer Data Hub product, a new program designed to pull data from numerous business systems and furnish up-to-the-minute information about customers.
He compared the product to the global consumer credit database used by banks and retailers around the world. That system is capable of storing vast amounts of incredibly detailed data, which it pulls from different companies' computers with nearly instantaneous updates, he said. It's also available around the clock. "The model of the credit data hub is exactly the one we followed for the Customer Data Hub," Ellison said.
The Customer Data Hub is another way to achieve the efficiencies that Oracle has always touted could be achieved only with a single "suite" of application software - preferably Oracle's, he said.
"Our original dream has not changed one bit," Ellison said. "We're still trying to solve the worst problem in the information age - data fragmentation."
Alorie Gilbert writes for News.com
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