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Ê [News Now] [Image] Oracle Enters Web Commerce Server Fray

Software giant announces pacts, demos servers.

October 18,1996 Martin Marshall

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Corp. will enter the Web commerce server wars sometime in early 1997, the company announced here this week.

Like an army mustering its troops and allies on a hillside before a battle, Oracle announced partnerships with Verifone, CyberCash and First Data Corp. to merge their Web-based payment systems with a new Oracle Payment Server that the company demonstrated.

Oracle also signed up Quark Inc. to create a Quark Publishing Server cartridge that will enable Web-based users to buy items found in any Quark-based catalog on the Web, and to process the purchase through the new Oracle Commerce Server, which was also demonstrated. To integrate, interface, assemble and install the systems, Oracle lined up EDS, KPMG, Computer Sciences Corp. and MCI Systemhouse, some of the largest systems integrators in the country.

While Oracle produced a proof-of-concept demonstration, the actual Oracle Merchant Server and the Oracle Payment Server will not achieve beta status until the end of the year, and will not be generally available until the end of March. According to Beatrice Infante, Oracle senior vice president for Internet and Media Products, the Oracle Merchant Server will appear first, with the Payment Server and Publishing Server lagging by about six weeks.

"This is what businesses are looking for, but there's a lot of 'gonna' in Oracle's presentation," said Geri Speiler, a research analyst for electronic commerce strategies at the Gartner Group, San Jose, Calif. "The question is, when is it going to happen?"

She points out that BroadVision Inc. and Connect Inc. already have Web-transaction enabled servers in place, as well as the better-known Netscape Suite Spot series. "It's Gartner Group's position that the acceptance of Web-based commerce will take about two years to take hold," she said. "There are a lot of questions like, 'Is the merchant on-line?,' 'Is the consumer on-line?' and 'Does your local Round Table pizza have an Oracle database?' that have to be resolved."

Not surprisingly, the Oracle Commerce Server does require an Oracle database to operate, although the Oracle Commerce Server can be layered on top of a Netscape HTTP server or Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Infante. The [initial deliveries of the Oracle Commerce Server will be on the Sun Solaris and Windows NT platforms, with releases for HP-UX, Digital Unix and other platforms following those releases by about a month, she said. Both the Oracle Commerce Server and Oracle Payment Server are written entirely in Java, so they are highly portable among a number of platforms.

Pricing for each of the products will be determined later, she said, when the products are delivered.

In the demonstrated example, the Oracle Commerce Server went beyond Web-based payment to a detailed linkage of business processes between suppliers and the companies purchasing their goods. "Supplier-managed inventory is possible," said Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, as he showed an inventory-management problem between a retailer and hardware supplier company being tracked down to a shipment awaiting registration on a remote inspection dock. Linkage to Federal Express package tracking was also an integrated part of the system.

The Quark Publishing cartridge will appear "within a year", according to Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi. It will enable 98 percent of the Web-based catalogs currently produced to add a purchasing element for direct transactions. L.L. Bean, Macy's/Federated and the Reed Travel Group will be among the first catalog-based vendors to adopt the Quark Publishing cartridge, Ebrahimi said. "We need these applications [Oracle Commerce Server and Payment Server] to implement this. It answers the question of how you can take German marks, deliver your product and then do your accounting in dollars," said Ebrahimi.

The Quark Publishing cartridge will encapsulate Quarkimedia, an interactive multimedia publishing capability that Quark released in September.

But, even the most enthusiastic early adopters of the Oracle e-commerce scheme concede that adoption of a Web-based commerce metaphor may be slowed more by psychology than technology. "It's going to take a transition before people become comfortable with typing in their credit card numbers," said Bryan Waters, vice president of technology and production at McGraw-Hill's Home Interactive division.

Waters plans to be one of the first Oracle Commerce Server users, selling his company's line of children's software on-line. His site [www.fledge.com] will be selling at least four children's software titles by the end of the year, but will require parental pre-payment to authorize the smaller purchases made by children, he said. "We don't really have micro-payment structures up, but we can introduce the concept of 'virtual allowances', where a parent can authorize $10 per month for a kid to spend, for example," he said.

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