SAN MATEO (11-13-95) - Database technology and development tools are the key to client/server applications for the World Wide Web, says Marc Benioff, senior vice president the Web/Workgroup System division at Oracle Corp. He tells Executive Editor/News Jai Singh and reporter Nick Wingfield why.
INFOWORLD: Netscape Communications Corp. is an established player in the Web server and browser market. Can Oracle offer anything beyond what Netscape offers?
BENIOFF: Netscape has incredible stock valuation, and they have a very well-known name. They have a widely installed browser, which is basically very rudimentary technology. Their server is only about 8 percent of the installed servers out there. The most popular server is from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is 44 percent from a survey done by First Individual.
But Netscape doesn't have a distribution organization. They don't have any established marketing channels except for the Internet. If Netscape doesn't buy a database company, the server technology that they're going to offer their customers is going to be very rudimentary. It's going to be just file sharing technology and APIs to databases. APIs to databases is an interesting idea, but those of us who have been around the database business for a long time know that APIs, like ODBC [Open Database Connectivity], have just never taken off. Why is that? The reason is that database customers need highly tuned, transaction-style performance from their databases. They rely primarily on the database vendors' tools to be able to offer that.
Today, what Oracle offers is a browser that has every feature that Netscape Navigator 2.0 has, plus we've added a local HTTP [Hypertext Transfer Protocol] server, a SQL database, and the Visual Basic programming language in the browser. These are compelling features for application developers; we believe this is our market.
INFOWORLD: How do you see a company like Microsoft Corp.? They can do an integrated database/Web server/browser package just as well as Oracle, can't they?
BENIOFF: Well, 37 percent of all Internet servers today are not on [Windows] NT or OS/2 but are on Solaris. The reason why is that NT is not a very robust platform for delivering large-scale applications. On the Internet, you want to be able to scale your application up very high, very fast. If you're going to do systems-level servers, you're going to use Solaris or some kind of derivative of Unix. Of course, most desktop users today run in Windows, but most don't use the Microsoft browser because it doesn't add any value over Netscape.
INFOWORLD: But Microsoft's dominance on the desktop means it will necessarily have an impact on the Internet market.
BENIOFF: We're targeting corporate application developers. This is our traditional marketplace. We aren't going after the end-user market per se. That's not our focus. We want to go talk to people like Fortune 500 companies who are trying to deploy Internet-based applications inside the corporate fire wall. And we want to do that through the addition of database power.
INFOWORLD: So do you think Informix [Software Inc.] and Sybase [Inc.] are going to be Oracle's main competitors in this arena?
BENIOFF: I think that our long-term competitors will be the database companies, not Netscape or Microsoft, because this is a scalable client/server problem and there's only a few companies who can do scalable client/server computing. Sybase is just barely starting to do that. Informix understands scalability.
INFOWORLD: Why is it so important that Oracle's customers get out on the Web right now? Is it for marketing reasons, or is it because you think they can make money doing electronic commerce?
BENIOFF: Our customers are deploying all kinds of interesting applications inside the fire wall as well as outside. If you call three or four large Fortune 500 companies like Oracle, ask them how many servers they have outside the wall and how many they have inside. What you'll find is hundreds inside.
What's going on? Well, it's easy to build and deploy applications with Internet standards. That's what's exciting about this. We have one customer -- Home Box Office -- that's deployed an HR system inside their company. Why did they do that? Lower cost, easy-to-use, simple, strong capabilities. They still get all the relational power. Every time they make a change [to an application], they don't have to distribute a change to all the clients. They don't have to pay run-time fees. They don't have to do any fancy networking.
I think it's going to be both internal and external. Today, we see things like HR, sales force automation, and corporate repositories inside. Outside, we see mostly marketing -- magazines, software distribution, and other marketing materials.
In the future, it will be electronic commerce. Today, that's not a reality.
INFOWORLD: Do you see Java as a competitor to Oracle Power Objects at all?
BENIOFF: I think it's kind of hard to know what people are going to build with Java. Power Objects is a client/server tool for Visual Basic builders who are not C++ programmers. Maybe there will be an Internet version of Power Objects that runs inside Power Browser. There's already some of that capability in there, if you think about it. As Java emerges, I think it could be interesting.
We're putting the technology into our browser that we know customers want. If they want Java, they've got it. If they want Basic, they've got it. We're not going to have any religious wars in our browser. But the key to our browser is that we have a built-in application development tool, not just a browser. What you don't get yet [with PowerBrowser] is drag-and-drop application development capabilities. But for us to go from where we are now to where we want to go... is no problem. That's a very different problem for a lot of other companies because they don't have that kind of expertise. We have a state-of-the-art client/server development tool. We just dropped the Basic engine out of Power Objects with very little work.
Our [Internet] strategy is very simple: give corporate application developers the tools that they already know to build Internet applications. We don't want to have to teach them some new scripting language, like [Netscape's] LiveWire Pro. Nobody knows LiveWire Pro. We're giving [developers] Basic.
INFOWORLD: As Oracle and Netscape continue to innovate their browsers, what will happen to Internet standards?
BENIOFF: There's very little today [on the browser] that we can't duplicate very quickly. We put frames in our product in two days. The technology sophistication [of browsers] is very minimal today. That's what most people don't understand. The first Netscape browser was only 9,000 lines of code. That's not a big development effort. It's like a month ... for a really good programmer. We're committed to having every feature that Microsoft and Netscape have in their browsers.
INFOWORLD: How is Oracle addressing security in its Web products?
BENIOFF: We're working on SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] and S-HTTP [Secure HTTP] security in our server. But we are looking at everything we can find. There's a lot of reports recently that make us very concerned about SSL and S-HTTP. We hope that there will be private networks that emerge with Internet standards that have security built into them.
INFOWORLD: How do you see the Internet market panning out 12 months from now?
BENIOFF: I have no idea, and neither does anybody else.
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