Oracle switches out own email system
In dumping its own internal client/server email system and switching to an Internet-based messaging platform, Oracle is simply following its own market advice.
In a company-wide memo to employees, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison announced that the company was ending its use of Oracle InterOffice client/server messaging software and moving to Web-based email with Netscape Communications' Communicator, a company spokesperson confirmed.
The Netscape Communicator email client will sit upon Oracle's own Internet Messaging product, which replaced InterOffice as Oracle's messaging product last year.
On the surface, the switch seems a little late in the game, as the company made the decision to replace InterOffice on the market with Internet Messaging 4.1 back in October.
The company began slimming the development team for InterOffice early last year. Oracle said the cuts were designed to increase the integration of its product development efforts, since InterOffice was folded into the company's application server division last November.
The decision to switch internally comes in the wake of a series of email system failures at the Redwood Shores, California-based company that Ellison said dampened employee morale.
"This does not necessarily build confidence in our technology prowess," Ellison said in the memo, according to the spokesman.
At fault, Ellison said in the memo, were outdated software and complex, unreliable hardware configurations, overburdened by increased email boxes.
In September 1997, Oracle released InterOffice 4.1. However, despite a company push for the technology, the software wasn't able to gain much ground in the groupware market--a niche controlled mainly by Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Development Notes. That situation spurred the decision to develop Internet Messaging for a newer and growing market.