Ellison lays into Microsoft at Oracle's Paris meeting

Oracle attracted around 2,000 developers to its first European Developers Conference in Paris last week. The event was organised to drum up support for Oracle's Network Computer Architecture (NCA) - better known as the company's attempt to take over the middleware market.

A raft of announcements and seminars covered every area, from network computers (NC) through to new server software, database announcements and a new strategy for applications.

But first delegates had to listen to Ellison himself.

What emerged was virtually the same sermon the Oracle chief executive has been preaching for over two years: the PC is a wasteful technology, the network is the future, and Oracle's standard for the NC will become the thin client of the future.

The biggest change was in tone. Ellison was contemptuous of Microsoft's applications strategy, and he laid into Office 97. 'The developers of Office 97 now give you different ways to underline your corrections - if you don't like the red wavy line you can have magenta stripes. Who needs this?'

But to take on Microsoft, Oracle will have to diversify its product range, and that is what the conference was all about - attracting developers to write applications for the NC and the newly announced NC Server.

The latest version of the Oracle Web Applications Server is now in beta test, and Oracle claims it is the world's first Corba-compliant Web server.

Also new is J/SQL, a pre-compiler which creates JDBC code and embeds SQL in the Java language.

'Using J/SQL, a developer can write in 15 lines what would take 56 lines of JDBC,' said Mark Jarvis, Oracle's vice president for server marketing.

Oracle also announced that it was positioning version 3.0 of its Discoverer query and reporting tool around its strategy to strengthen the company's brand name in the end-user community and help in the battle with Microsoft.

As a result, the /2000 branding will be dropped. This is currently used with Discoverer, which associates it with the firm's development tools, called Developer and Designer/2000.

John Watton, Oracle's end-user tools marketing manager, said: 'This is all about unlocking information for the end user, and Discoverer will be key to that, establishing Oracle as a key player in the end-user market rather than just the database and development market.'

Discoverer version 3.0, formerly codenamed Project Odysseus, is due in the first quarter of next year. This is a rewrite of Developer/2000 versions 1.0 and 2.0, which provides integrated query and report-writing capabilities.

It also provides the non-technical end user with simple analysis capabilities.

Version 3.0 will be sold in two flavours - an administration copy for the IT department to configure the system, and in end-user licence form.

Pricing has not yet been decided.

But, Watton said, Project Odysseus was complementary to, rather than competitive with, Oracle's Express family of Olap tools.

These complex tools were aimed at specialist users wanting to undertake deeper analysis and 'what if' queries, including those for forecasting, budgeting and planning, he explained.

Additional reporting by VNU Newswire.