In an exclusive interview with CNET Malaysia, Mark Jarvis, senior vice president, worldwide marketing, Oracle Corp, said the company currently has a three-year lead ahead of its competitors and believes it will be able to maintain that lead.
"While our competitors are building version one (of their Internet sofware products), we are building version three. The big issue here is that they lack the the software and the tools."
Unlike Oracle, he said, many companies are pushing the "e-business" message but do not have the software to support that message. "Software is important because it defines an e-business."
Jarvis attributes this lead to the fact that Oracle decided to focus on nothing else except building software for the Internet, four years ago.
The company today calls this focus its Internet Platform vision and message with products and services covering application servers and databases to customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
"We are now benefitting from the Internet "gold rush" while our competitors are still building software for the Internet. Four years ago, they were still developing client-server software," said Jarvis.
Competition, he added, comes mainly from IBM and SAP, with their respective solutions for customers who want to venture into e-business.
IBM's e-business solutions cater to customer relationship management, e-commerce, supply chain management and business intelligence.
SAP, meanwhile, came up with mySAP.com which the company describes as "the open, collaborative Internet solution for this new world".
mySAP.com essentially enables people in different enterprises and their customers work together as one, calling it c-business or collaborative business.
It is a fact, said Linus Lai, senior market analyst, IDC Malaysia, that all three companies have transformed to become more focused on solutions that are portal- and Internet-based.
"What we have today is the Internet with its many Web sites and portals. These need databases and that is what companies like Oracle, IBM and SAP are doing - building products that can handle data of all types, for example, multimedia and online queries."
Oracle, said Lai, is positioning itself to be the database vendor for anything that has to do with Internet content.
While Oracle believes the Internet gold rush will continue to be big revenue churner this year, another area with huge potential for the company is in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges.
"We'll definitely see more initiatives similar to the Ford AutoExchange happening over the course of the next few months. We recently completed a retail supply exchange with Carrefour and Sears," said Jarvis.
The company, he said, is potentially looking towards such B2B exchanges in industries where "the most money change hands such as aerospace and financial services."
Based on figures from Collaborative Research 1999, 64 percent of Fortune 100 companies and 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies were Oracle's customers.
And according to thestreet.com Internet Index Stocks 1999, 93 percent of the world's successful dot com companies run on Oracle B2B products.
In Malaysia, Oracle's B2B products will soon form the main database engine for a proposed 'chemical exchange' portal in the region.
Last month, the company also announced the trimming of its channel partners as part of its transformation to become the premier software provider for the Internet commerce.
The company's Oracle Partner Program (OPP), introduced 18 months ago has in 2 years seen a reduction from 300 partners to 50 partners as of last month and is now going after local dot coms.
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