Oracle softens stance on integration
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
Oracle has ended its crusade to get customers to run their entire enterprises on the Oracle E-Business suite.
"Go ahead and keep Siebel as your CRM system, or E.piphany as your marketing system, and SAP as your accounting application," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in his keynote address at Oracle AppsWorld, his company's annual user conference, which took place in San Diego in January.
Ellison's statement was dramatic because Oracle has until now been the last holdout among the large enterprise software suppliers to insist that trying to knit together applications from different suppliers made no sense. Most industry observers believed Oracle took that position primarily because it wanted companies to buy all their applications from Oracle. But Ellison said that was not the case.
"The Holy Grail of the E-Business Suite was not to convince the world that it should buy applications only from Oracle—although that would be a good thing," Ellison said. "The fundamental goal was to have a single database with all of your customer data. We thought the easiest way to deliver that was to start with a single data model and build all of the applications around that single global database."
Ellison remains convinced that having a single set of applications built around a single database is the least expensive way to manage an enterprise software system. In recognition of that fact, Oracle plans to introduce something called a data hub later this year. The hub would be a central repository for all of a company's data, with all of the company's applications—from Oracle and other vendors—connected to the single database. Ellison calls this "just a different way of accomplishing our original goal."
The data hub is actually part of what Oracle calls its new information architecture. Ellison says the architecture offers three paths for achieving the single-database goal. The first path, and still the most preferable to Oracle, is to adopt the entire E-Business suite. The second one is to use the integration tools within the E-Business suite to link it with legacy applications that a company wants to keep. The third path is to have all applications connected to an Oracle data hub.
In adopting this approach, Oracle is finally catching up with other large enterprise software vendors, most notably SAP, which also had to realize that very few, if any, companies are going to buy all of their applications from a single vendor. In fact, Bruce Richardson, senior VP with Boston-based AMR Research, described Oracle's new architecture as "a response to SAP's NetWeaver."
