The Bloor Perspective: Oracle marches on, Oftel's dilemma and Sun storage under the microscope

In its most recent financial statements, Oracle reported fourth quarter earnings of $926m, or 31 cents per share. This compares favourably with expectations of 25 cents. This represents a 76 per cent growth in earnings whilst revenues have risen by a mere 17 per cent to $3.4bn. The full year figures show a net income of $2.1bn on revenues of $10.1bn.

While the growth in database sales was not as high as expected - only 12 per cent to $2.1bn - Oracle's sales figures have exceeded expectations in every other aspect of its business. It has done well with its business applications, which generated $447m in the fourth quarter. This was a 61 per cent rise but the star of the show is the Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which grew by 161 per cent. This rapid growth was to be expected since the CRM solution is still relatively new and is receiving significant attention within Oracle.

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from these figures. First, Oracle is clearly succeeding in its stated objective of saving internal costs by adopting its own technological philosophies. It has centralised and unified many of its sales and administrative processes and has reduced overheads by 44.1 per cent as a consequence. The aim was to reduce costs by $1bn and, at the last count, the actual savings were close to double that figure.

The second conclusion is that a high proportion of the applications sales must have been to existing users of the Oracle database. This would account, to some extent, for the relatively low growth in revenue generated by the database although Oracle has indicated that the number of large sales was reduced because it withdrew its heavy discounting policy.

Whatever the case, Oracle knows that its database sales will recover - the pipeline has been described as 'stunning' - because it has always had strong technical ties between the applications and the database. As long as the applications are selling well, then the database business will continue to do well also.

*Oft-hell*

The UK's telecoms watchdog, Oftel, is between a rock and a hard place. Back in March, it confirmed that 1 July 2001 was to be the "absolute deadline" for the unbundling of the local loop. At the same time, however, PM Tony Blair was in Lisbon signing up to a pan-European agreement that fixed the deadline for the end of 2000. Now it is looking like the EC will hold Oftel in breach of directives that are hastily being drawn up to carry forward the Lisbon agreement. A storm is brewing, and it looks unlikely to be the last for poor Oftel.

As if it were not enough to be accused of sluggishness by the EC, when it acts, it is accused of pandering to the incumbent telco BT and penalising UK businesses in the process. At the end of last week, Oftel's attempts to kick-start the stalemate over the xDSL rollout were met with incredulity by some members of the Spectrum Management forum, set up by Oftel itself to keep momentum in the unbundling process. Already, Oftel is expressing fears about missing the unbundling deadline and this is without taking into account the fact that, according to the EC, it has already let the date slip six months.

Not everything that Oftel has done has been seen as such a bad thing, however. The decision made at the end of last month, that BT SurfTime was uncompetitive as BT did not offer a wholesale version of the product, was well received. ISPs can now resell BT's SurfTime in whichever way they choose: this will effectively open up the market to a whole new wave of unmetered access deals.

This has both up- and downsides. On the upside, prices will come further than the currently offered deals however the complexity of the market will no doubt increase, while the quality of service may drop in the short term anyway.

Whatever the final date for unbundling, be it Christmas or the middle of next year (and we rather suspect the former, after all Tony Blair is never wrong), the pressure gauge will rise and Oftel will have no choice but to accept its share.

*Sun's new hot spot?*

Sun has announced a new storage strategy and a new product line, the flagship of which is the StorEdge T3 - code name Purple - which fits 300Gb in a box the size of a desktop computer. The StorEdge range is designed to plug into AIX and Windows NT networks as well as Sun's own Solaris OS environments - the goal is to provide open, scalable storage to work in heterogeneous environments.

Having said this, 15 years ago, Sun was one of the first companies to apply the 'Open Systems' label to its Unix-based workstation and server products. In this context, 'open' meant, "can communicate with other Unix systems". It is worth delving a little into what Sun means by open storage - look no further than Jiro.

Jiro (previously known as StoreX) has been on the cards for a long time and should provide a set of interfaces to enable heterogeneous storage systems to be managed, configured and allocated as a single, virtual hierarchy. The StorEdge range of products will be Jiro-enabled and, as Sun's storage website proudly boasts, "many technology industry leaders support the Jiro effort". This includes companies like Legato and Veritas, who together have the storage software market pretty much sewn up.

Trouble is, Jiro isn't the only storage management standardisation effort in town. The Storage Networking Industry Association is looking to provide exactly what Jiro supports. Similarly, the Distributed Management Task Force is also working on storage management standards. The good news is that the two organisations are working together.

So what of Jiro? Companies like Veritas freely admit that they are standards-agnostic and they are supporting the work of SNIA and Jiro, not to mention efforts of other organisations such as the Fibre Alliance.

Companies such as EMC and Sterling (now part of CA) have also proudly presented their storage management facilities, all the time actively supporting the standards bodies.

All in all, storage management standardisation is not a pretty picture. No doubt, as with Java, Sun's idea of an open standard is one that Sun has the casting vote over. Jiro may have its technical merits and it may have the buy in of other organisations, but it appears that the possibility of a truly open storage environment is a long way off yet.