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Oracle redefines the balance of power

Database giant's Network Computing Architecture makes it a real player in the intranet

By William Blundon, JavaWorld.com, 11/01/96

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Henry Kissinger writes persuasively in his book Diplomacy about the end of the Cold War and its impact on the next century. The following decades will not revolve around the competing visions of two superpowers, but rather will wander among the shifting alliances between a great number of less dominant powers. The coming era will be different from the present one, and so will be the nations that define it.

None of the most important countries that must build a new world order have any experience with the emerging multistate system. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.

Similarly, in the first year of the commercial Internet, all eyes have been on Netscape and Microsoft, and the market has revolved around the competing visions of these two superpowers. The next few years, however, will be different. In the first year After Internet (AI), most major technology companies have gotten their Internet acts together. The software world has changed from a monopoly to a cold war, and is moving towards a multistate or Kieretsu period with astonishing speed.

This Kieretsu period places new demands on competitive strategy. Microsoft has not had any serious competitors in desktop operating systems since the introduction of the Macintosh in the mid-1980s. It has had no major competitor in desktop languages or applications for five years. Netscape had very little serious competition in browsers until Internet Explorer 3.0. Both companies are excellent competitors with superb technology. However, the world to come is more like diplomacy than boxing. And what is diplomacy? Simply the continuation of war by means that are equally dangerous but much more subtle.

After 10 long years of struggle with Sybase, Informix, IBM, and Ingres, Oracle understands how to thrive in an intensely competitive software market where conflict and diplomacy are inextricably woven. Oracle has established itself as a technological powerhouse rivaled only by Microsoft and IBM. However, like IBM, Oracle's true strength lies in transforming its technological prowess into customer success. In the Internet, that transformation is called Network Computing Architecture (NCA), and it may well be the best strategy for prevailing in the Internet's Kieretsu period.

Network Computing Architecture

NCA is a comprehensive vision not only of how Internet technologies mesh, but how customers can use them to solve business problems. As such, NCA is a unifying framework that allows the different worlds of client/server, the Web, and N-tier object computing to share a common computing model based on standards. NCA also leverages the best of each technology and integrates it into a whole. It also is quite a bit more than just elegant marketecture. The center of the universe in most corporations is a database and the information contained in it. NCA is unabashedly database-centric, and its greatest value lies in making data and services available as widely and as conveniently as possible.

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