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Oracle Uses Linux to Compete with IBM

In recent months, Oracle Corp. has begun a more aggressive move into the Linux community. Today the company announced the availability of its enterprise-level application server for Linux, Oracle Internet application server 8i (Oracle iAS).

The company also made other Linux-related announcements today, including expanded marketing agreements with other Linux vendors such as Caldera, SuSE, and VA Linux Systems.

Because of its recent marketing efforts, Oracle says in July 2000 users downloaded 285,000 copies of Oracle 8i for Linux database -- which was released in July 1999. The company also says that rate is four times the amount of downloads they had for Oracle 8i on Windows 2000.

"We started shipping Oracle 8i for Linux in July 99 and we have a had a huge response. By March we said we'd make Linux products tier one ports," says Bob Shimp, senior director of Internet platform development at Oracle (www.oracle.com). The company is now shipping new Linux products at the same time it releases new products for the Windows environment.

Oracle decided to move heavily into the Linux space for a few reasons. "We definitely see this market taking off, and the Linux market is a large incremental opportunity for us. But we are also targeting IBM in the marketplace." Shimp says. "We are going aggressively against IBM in the middlware market, and we are going toward more Linux solutions. We want to bring value to our customers, but definitely IBM is a target."

While Oracle is going to continue to challenge IBM (www.ibm.com) with its existing product line, the company also has plans to do so with its new products.

"This summer we'll be making Oracle 11i for Linux, and we are also rolling out new technologies in the application server space. Project Calypso, which is going to be built into our app server, will speed up Web sites and give the ability to cache dynamic content. This will be built into our application server and goes against IBM's family of accelerator tools," Shimp says. - Alicia Costanza

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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