Oracle 9i will ship late, says Gartner

The next major release of Oracle's database will be delayed by up to seven months and the product's most important enhancement, a clustering feature, will only be used by a small percentage of users, according to researcher Gartner.

Oracle unveiled its 9i database and application server amid great fanfare at Oracle Openworld earlier this month when chief executive Larry Ellison promised that the database would be publicly available in March 2001.

But Gartner research director Betsy Burton, speaking at the researcher's Symposium/ITxpo last week, said the product is at the frozen code stage and would not go into beta for another few months, delaying general availability until between August and October 2001.

An Oracle spokeswoman would only comment that the database is scheduled to be available "in spring 2001".

Gartner also believes that the database's much-hyped cache fusion technology, aimed at improved high availability and cluster management, will not be applicable to a large percentage of Oracle's user base.

"Ten per cent of Oracle's user base use clustering technologies and less than five per cent use it for high availability, so cache fusion won't be applicable to a lot of customers," said Burton, adding that companies will also continue to consider IBM and NCR for fault-tolerant requirements.

Oracle also launched its 9i application server last month, and Gartner believes the company has given the product range a new lease of life because it has been losing market share to rival BEA. The product is available now and is more closely linked to the database, but Burton warns that this will lock users into the Oracle world.

She adds that Oracle's development tools will continue to be given a low priority in the company, because that area is less of a money spinner. Customers will use the tools, which include Forms, Designer and J Developer, if they are an Oracle shop, but the platform will not attract companies with heterogeneous environments.

Elsewhere in Oracle's business, Burton said one of the company's major challenges is the lack of "depth" to its customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning applications.

Burton also noted that Oracle is ahead of its time in implementing web front ends to its CRM product, but questioned whether users are quite ready to kit out their field sales teams with web browser tools.

Gartner also warned that the cost of Oracle licences will "increase uncontrollably" under the company's controversial Power Unit Pricing (UPU) scheme introduced last year. Almost all of the IT executives who attended Burton's session about Oracle at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo said they are dissatisfied with the new pricing scheme.

Burton urged users to look for alternatives to UPU and to negotiate "tenaciously" with Oracle.

She believes Oracle has changed its pricing structure because it wants to become an applications service provider and a managed service provider. In these markets, paying for the right to use software for a period of time rather than perpetually is common. But Burton warned that this could end up being more costly for users, because the terms might be more expensive when it comes to renegotiation.

She also urged users to print out the terms and conditions they agree to the moment they buy products on Oracle's website, because the company regularly changes the small print.