Oracle will made available yesterday (Dec. 10) its Application Server 10g, a version of the software designed for grid computing.
Details of the server software, which manages and serves up multiple applications to remote users on a grid of low-cost Intel servers, were unveiled at the OracleWorld user conference in September. Like past versions, 10g also will run on a large Intel or Unix server, says V.J. Tella, Oracle's chief strategy officer.
Mike McDermott, chief operations officer at Cisco Inc., a company that provides consulting services for Oracle technologies, says the grid feature is important. "Seventy-five percent of our customers in the past year have been asking to run Oracle on dual-processor servers running Red Hat Linux," McDermott says, adding that that's a shift away from running Oracle Application Server on large Unix servers. Cost savings is the driving factor, McDermott says.
Oracle has been trying to expand its customer base for Application Server by lowering prices, optimizing for grid computing, and adding features. Robert Shimp, Oracle's VP of technology marketing, says the company has seen success with those efforts and now boasts 16,000 licenses for the software, which he says "is the best metric" of that success.
Research firms IDC's figures have consistently shown IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic vying for the lead in the application-server market, based on revenue from sales. Last year, Oracle began offering Application Server free as part of a bundle to independent software vendors, who then provide it to their customers as part of a larger system. The practice complicates accurate counts in the application-server marketplace, analysts say.
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