SAN FRANCISCO — After a year since its debut, Oracle is preparing to announce the second
version of its 10g server software.
Oracle chairman Jeff Henley said the company would announce the
update of one of its more popular database and application server products on Tuesday morning.
A source close to the news said Oracle would not release actual
product but would announce the timeframe for the future release of both
Oracle’s 10g Database and Application Server products.
Company co-president Charles Phillips reiterated Henley’s news and
pointed out that Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Chuck
Rozwat and his team of engineers were primarily responsible for the
success of the 10g Grid platform. During a press meeting at the
company’s OpenWorld conference here Monday, Philips pointed out that
half of its shipments are 10g products.
As a precursor to the launch, the company released its Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g platform Monday. The server software focuses
on query, reporting and analysis, meta data management, data quality and
BI application development.
The standalone product includes direct access to Oracle OLAP from
within Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The technology allows for access to
both relational (SQL) and online analytical processing (OLAP) data
within a single reporting environment. Oracle executives said they were
spending more time integrating products with Microsoft’s software. In a separate item, system builder Unisys
introduced new software that allows the Oracle and Microsoft platforms to work
better together.
Oracle’s Business Intelligence 10g platform also includes a Warehouse
Builder for Extraction, Transformation and Loading, activities required
to populate data warehouses and OLAP applications with clean,
consistent, integrated and properly summarized data. The BI platform
comes with an application development tool called Oracle BI Beans.
The company is expected to launch its new Web services tools and
a content management server, code-named Tsunami, as the cornerstone of its new information lifecycle management (ILM)
strategy.
Henley and Philips both said Oracle Grid products are dovetailing
nicely with its movement toward creating specialized Data Hubs. Earlier this year, Oracle released its Customer Data
Hub as a way to entice companies to buy its business intelligence
offerings and differentiate itself from rivals like SAP and Siebel
Systems.
Now, Oracle is coming out with a bevy of personalized systems
including Oracle Citizen Data Hub, Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub,
Financial Consolidation Hub, Financial Services Accounting Data Hub, and
Oracle Product Data Hub.
Philips said the Hubs are part of Oracle’s approach to a broader
market movement toward Service Oriented Applications
use the modular hubs. Oracle is touting the Hubs for content consistency
in concert with its Grid infrastructure for resource virtualization and
provisioning.
“The idea is to simplify and optimize. So you can run an
application that takes advantage of multiple machines without changing
the applications,” Philips said.
