Oracle Emerging as Top Dog of E-business Solutions

Gary Bloom, a systems VP, tells how the software company saves big bucks by streamlining.

Author:: Tish Williams
Publish date:: May 8, 2000 3:54 PM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO --

Oracle's

coat is glossy and its teeth are white and strong.

And forget being a database pit bull, Oracle is becoming an e-business show dog. How is it making this transition? The company is eating its own

Alpo

, according to

Gary Bloom

, executive vice president of system products.

Attendees at the

Chase H&Q Technology Conference

here were told they were getting not "the richest guy at Oracle; instead we got the smartest guy at Oracle." And, like a smart guy, Bloom went over slide after slide of Oracle's own e-business transformation. It's not just selling this stuff, it's sticking its snout in the bowl and gulping it down.

Bloom estimated the database powerhouse has saved $200 million on centralized software and systems. For example, it eliminated 90 email servers, narrowed the number down to six or seven, and standardized on

Netscape's

email client.

Oracle knows what it's doing in putting all its processes online. Just getting expenses, benefits, hiring, travel, purchase orders and the like on the Web, and approved in one place, saved the company $10 million to $11 million, Bloom says. A tricky global administrative streamlining saved $50 million.

The company saved $550 million on the slightly vexing concept of "self-serve service." Shoot, if he's saving $550 million, we won't trouble him with a little thing like service

sans

service. It's not that tricky, we've heard of this stuff before: Oracle has beefed up its online-help presence to troubleshoot with customers before they phone in for expensive person-to-person assistance. The company is consolidating its 45 data centers across the world.

Oracle fit into a morning of reinvention at the H&Q conference.

Dell

(DELL) - Get Report

introduced itself as "The Internet Infrastructure Company." Street-feting

Nokia

(NOK) - Get Report

focused less on its mobile supremacy and more on its service future as Tom Lyon, chief technology officer of the

Nokia Internet Communications

unit, detailed his plans to get the juggernaut's mobile customers access to Internet services before all the Internet companies get around to it.

Even

Global Crossing

(GLBX)

promised to scale back its capitalization ways and pick up some good habits. CFO Dan Cohrs humbly offered that he is "optimistic about the valuation recovery of

his company." It is a time to depend less on your traditional ways to get you to the next level and think of something better.

And so not only are Oracle's "database revenues accelerating to historic highs," according to Bloom, but also it's marching ahead to offer the benefits of your business-to-business big dogs like

Ariba

(ARBA)

, as well as your

Vantive

(PSFT)

call centers and your

Vignette

(VIGN)

Web-publishing systems. Bloom touted growth of 45% in enterprise resource planning, a 24% uptick in customer-resource management, and 24% increase in supply-chain applications in the most recent quarter. Sure, Oracle's big

11i

application is due out in 60 to 90 days. But e-business services are making the big difference, internally and externally.

With $1 billion in operation efficiencies on the clock in the past 12 months, Bloom strode into new territory. Heck, he offered, they might even make it $2 billion.