Oracle aims at Microsoft with upgraded Beehive collaboration [Computerworld]

Interesting to see myself quoted in this article, since I’ve been working at Microsoft for ~4 months. Also a small world instance; I used to work for David Gilmour (now Oracle’s VP of collaboration technologies, also quoted in the article) at Lotus, more than twenty years ago…

Oracle Corp. today announced enhancements to its recently launched Beehive collaboration software in hopes of positioning it more strongly against long-established offerings from Microsoft Corp. and IBM.

Oracle also slashed its entry-level price for Beehive by more than half, while announcing prices for a cloud-based version.

My current $.02 on Beehive: while it might have made sense for Oracle to start from scratch with a new communication/collaboration/content management product more than five years ago, when Oracle architect Terry Olkin reportedly starting working on Beehive at Oracle (incidentally, this means there was an Oracle product development team implicitly betting Oracle Collaboration Suite would fail several years before it ultimately did, and was replaced by Beehive, last fall), Oracle now has a strategic positioning challenge due to the increasing overlap among Oracle WebCenter (based in part on products picked up when it acquired BEA in early 2008) and Oracle Universal Content Management (based on Oracle’s 2006 Stellent acquisition). Since both WebCenter and UCM have market momentum, I suspect Oracle’s sales force will stay focused on them rather than Beehive.

Oracle aims at Microsoft with upgraded Beehive collaboration