Oracle 9i To Launch At OpenWorld

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September 29, 2000 (12:00 AM EDT)

Just three months after shipping the latest incarnation of Oracle 8i, Oracle will formally unveil Oracle 9i.

At the company's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco next week, Oracle executive vice president Charles Rozwat will announce a major new version of the company's database aimed squarely at ASPs and B-to-B exchanges, said sources familiar with the company's plans.

"Hosting companies are starting to get brought into the mix," one ASP said. "Oracle realizes we're part of their distribution model."

Oracle Corp. (stock: ORCL) launched its iHost Authorized Application Provider program in July. In addition, Oracle has major investments and equity in several B-to-B exchanges such as automobile exchange Cosivint.

Oracle 9i, expected to ship in mid-2001, will offer service providers and B-to-B exchanges enhanced high availability, including more than tenfold improvement in scalability, real-time clustering support, and native XML support, said sources in the service provider community. Real-time clustering will enable customers to add a node to a cluster without repartitioning the data. There will also be major enhancements to application clustering, sources said.

As another benefit to ASPs and B-to-B exchanges, the company is expected to announce the Oracle Dynamic Services Framework, which like Hewlett-Packard's eSpeak, is an open platform for creating and using Internet-based services such as Oracle's Internet Directory.

Oracle intends for the directory service, for example, to be used as a registry, storage, and authentication center for Internet content and proprietary data. Oracle's approach is similar to the recently proposed UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) standard from Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT), IBM Corp. (stock: IBM), and Ariba Inc. (stock: ARBA).

Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has been ambivalent about the role of ASPs. At one point he said the Redwood Shores, Calif., company would offer software via an ASP rental model "over my dead body."