Oracle reboots collaboration app
Connecting state and local government leaders
Oracle releases new collaboration software, as well a data warehousing-friendly hardware package.
Oracle has decided to announce a number of new and even
surprising releases during its Oracle OpenWorld conference, being
held this week in San Francisco.
The company has released a new collaboration software package,
called Beehive. Beehive features e-mail, calendar, tasks and
contacts as well as shared workspaces. It can offer full
authentication capabilities. Unlike other collaboration platforms,
all the Beehive components are managed through a single console,
the company literature states.
This is not the first collaboration suite Oracle has released.
Previously, the company offered a package named the Oracle
Collaboration Suite, which offered many ofthe same capabilities.
"Beehive should not be viewed as an upgrade, whether major or
minor, to Oracle Collaboration Suite. It needs to be viewed as an
entirely new product range, built after learning the lessons of
previous attempts," said David Mitchell, a vice president at IT
analysis firm Ovum, in a statement. Oracle Collaboration Suite was
not widely adopted in the market, with Oracle finding difficulties
in persuading customers to adopt the technology. Beehive, with its
much improved functionality, architecture and user-interaction
models, has the potential to change that pattern."
The company also took this week to announce its first hardware
offering, the HP Oracle Database Machine, a package of servers
outfitted for data warehousing duties.
The package consists of two sets of servers'one set for
running the database and business intelligence tools, and another
set of servers for storing data. Eight Hewitt-Packard Proliant
DL360 G5 servers run the Oracle database and business intelligence
software, while 14 HP ProLiant DL180 G5 servers, each holding up to
12 1 terabyte SATA disk drives, offers an aggregated storage
capability of 168 TB.
Connecting the storage with the database are Voltaire Infiniband
interconnects, which can provide an aggregated 14
gigabit-per-second throughput, 1 GB/s per storage server, for
moving data between the database servers and the storage
servers.
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