Is Oracle making a major play into the collaboration space through a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation?
The Mozilla Foundation revealed at the FOSDEM conference in February that the database giant had hired three people to work on Mozilla Lightning. This project, which aims to integrate Mozilla's calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook.
Despite repeated requests over the last two months, Oracle has been unable to provide ZDNet UK with a spokesperson to speak about its work on the Lightning project. The Mozilla Foundation itself directed inquiries on the issue back to Oracle.
With Oracle reluctant to talk about its work with Mozilla, the industry has been left to speculate on whether Oracle plans to follow Novell's lead in releasing an open source collaboration product.
Gervase Markham, a Mozilla staff member, speculated at FOSDEM that Oracle's main motivation in working with Mozilla on the Lightning project is likely to be to create a competitor to Microsoft Outlook, and ultimately take market share away from Exchange.
"I think Larry Ellison wants to [give two fingers to] Bill Gates," said Markham at FOSDEM. "Larry feels that with small amount of investment and time he can make Bill Gates worried. The Exchange monopoly is based on the Outlook monopoly — people pay shed-loads of cash for Exchange. If we can provide an alternative to Outlook it will make Microsoft worried."
James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk, agreed that Oracle's work with Mozilla could help it achieve a long-term goal of success in the collaboration software market.
"Oracle has been trying to push into the collaboration space for at least five years," said Governor. "They want to succeed in the collaboration and communications area as it's a control point in the enterprise — look at how much of Microsoft's success is predicated on Outlook. Maybe Oracle feels it could have more success with an open source product [rather than a proprietary one]."
Analyst firm Forrester Research recommended last year that Oracle could use the open source route to tackle the incumbents in the collaboration market. In a report entitled Oracle's Path to Collaboration Success, Forrester said that Oracle should consider releasing an open source version of its collaboration application, Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS), to enable it to crack into the market.
"Oracle will never dethrone Microsoft and IBM in the collaboration platform market by simply competing on price and features," said the report. "To truly light a competitive fire under OCS, Oracle must take some calculated risks that change the dynamic of the whole collaboration platform market."
"To really shake up the market Oracle should consider releasing a version of OCS to the open source community. Currently a gaping hole exists in the open source stack when it comes to enterprise messaging and collaboration."
Forrester warned that this could be a gamble. "The risk is great: Oracle could cannibalise OCS revenues and lose some of its intellectual property," said the report.
It is possible that due to the risks of releasing the source code of its current product, Oracle is instead planning on offering support for both proprietary and open source collaboration tools. Novell has already adopted this strategy and offers support for its proprietary collaboration tool GroupWise and for open source alternatives SuSE Linux Openexchange Server and Evolution.
But, it is also possible that Oracle is merely working with Mozilla to ensure that OCS works better with Mozilla's email software. In January 2004, Oracle and Mozilla said they were collaborating on a project to improve the integration between Oracle's business applications and Mozilla's desktop software. At the time, Oracle said it would announce the collaboration formally "in the next year".
Talkback
You got to hand it to Larry Ellison. He just doesn't quit. But when will he learn?
Years ago i caught my bookkeeper embezzling, and my accountant strangely looking the other way. So i took the problem to my layer and he gave me some advice i'll never forget, “If you're going to corner a rat, you better be prepared to kill it”.
While the collaborative computing plan is a good idea, i don't see where Oracle is ready to move in for the kill. And if they don't make the kill with that first shot, it's Oracle that had better watch out. The backlash will be incredible.
It's not enough to think you can take out OutLook and Exchange with a collaborative alternative. Oracle has to take out the entire application productivity layer. Which can be done using cross platform Open Source alternatives based on the OpenOffice.org – Mozilla core.
This is exactly what IBM is going to do with WorkPlace, a portable productivity environment built out of integrated from OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and the Lotus Notes Client. The components are bound together with a new information management interface, the extraordinary project – activity management application that sits at the heart of WorkPlace.
Could Oracle do the same? Of course. Oracle has built a collaboration suite client that connects to their many server side systems. This is analogous to the server side accelerators IBM has bolted into WorkPlace optimizing connectivity to WebSphere, Notes, and DB2 server systems. There is also plenty of reason to believe that Adobe will interconnect an Adobe WorkPlace version to the Adobe stack of server side systems.
What Oracle needs to do though is concentrate on the whole end user interface, and provide an integrated environment similar to WorkPlace. This would be a single install of Oracle Office that works very much the same on the many versions of Windows and Linux distros.
Open Source efforts like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are made to be interoperable with all other aspects of the productivity environment and server side systems. Bu ton their own they are not an “integrated” environment. And that's exactly what Oracle is up against. The integrated productivity environment of MS Office, OutLook, VB, .NET, Access, InfoPath, and the server suites of SharePoint, Exchange, Server 2003, MS SQL, Collaboration Server etc.
What Microsoft offers the marketplace is an integrated stack of desktop, device, and server systems. We can argue about how well the promise matches the reality, but it is an integrated stack. And you can't attack an integrated stack at the layer level and think that somehow your current meager measure of interoperability with the rest of the environment will persist. No body has ever been able to do that. Least ways not as long as Chairman Bill is at the helm, and the rule of the day is whatever it takes. And he does mean “whatever it takes”.
IBM is attacking with a cross platform integrated stack model. Will Oracle do the same? Not from what i can see.
~ge~