06 September 2003

Now this looks interesting. Infoworld reports that Oracle plan to announce 'EM To Go', an extension to Enterprise Manager 4.0 that allows PDAs with wireless facilities to receive alerts and reports on your Oracle databases. According to the article, "EM to Go is an extension of Enterprise Manager, Oracle's suite of database management tools. It runs on a PDA with wireless capabilities such as Hewlett-Packard's iPaq and provides a database administrator (DBA) with alerts when a problem arises with their database." Whilst it's not a full remote DBA utility such as Expand Beyond's Pocket DBA, it sounds like a useful utility for gadget-freaks like me who'd be keen to start using their PDAs to monitor and maintain their Oracle databases and application server. From the article, it sounds as if Oracle planned to include EM To Go with Oracle 9.2, but have reworked it to work with 10G's Grid features. More details are being announced at Ken Jacobs' keynote speech next week at Oracleworld. 7:21:37 PM

"Larry Ellison believes that a software company has to have two world class products if it is going to have a long life" reports Robin Bloor in this it-analysis.com article. Microsoft has it with Office and Windows; IBM has it with DB2 and Websphere; and Oracle has it with the Oracle Database and Oracle Applications. After that, however, the article points out BEA, SAP and CA, traditional competitors to Oracle, who have just one product and are therefore in danger of being squeezed out of their one market. This, apparently is why Oracle are so keep to snap up Peoplesoft, as Applications are the weaker of their two killer products, and it also explains why all Oracle's competitive attention is going towards Microsoft and IBM. 12:42:49 PM