A few years ago, Oracle proclaimed the Network Computing Architecture as the computing layout to challenge Windows' dominance. As the company explained yesterday how it would incorporate Java support across its entire database product line, the architecture received scant mention.
The company says that's because its plans for Java are now synonymous with those for the Network Computing Architecture. Java Strategy Day, held Wednesday at company headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, was a chance to expound publicly on those plans.
"Java is all about making NCA real," said Mark Jarvis, Oracle's vice president of system products. "To make NCA truly happen, it's going take Java on the client, Java on the network." In short, Java everywhere, he said.
Ubiquitous Java -- a vision Sun Microsystems has proclaimed, but not yet delivered for its own flagship software -- is the banner Oracle draped over itself during Java Strategy Day. Oracle is the company that can put Java everywhere, Jarvis said, because it is the company with database software everywhere.
By incorporating support for Sun's Java into its entire product line, Oracle believes it can finally deliver the all-pervasive, cross-platform presence the language has so far failed to achieve.
Describing its new strategy, dubbed "300 Percent Java," as being "centered around the Network Computing Architecture," the company said it will provide support for Sun's Java standard in its client, application, and server products by the end of 1998. The "300 Percent" refers to Java's presence on all three network tiers.
"The best way to get Java deployed is to put it on databases that businesses run today," Jarvis said. "Eighty-five percent of them run on top of Oracle."
To put Java "in" databases -- in addition to putting it on client computers and in application servers -- Oracle is embedding a Java Virtual Machine, compatible with Sun's standard, within a new version of its Oracle8 database server software. This should be available by the end of 1998.
"From a Java momentum standpoint, this is good news for Java," said Zona Research analyst Ron Rappaport. "They're not taking the HP path ... They're hugging Java with both arms, and that's good for Sun."
Hewlett-Packard said recently that it would develop its own proprietary version of embedded Java for printers and other constrained-networked devices.
Rappaport is less certain about the implications of yesterday's announcements for the NCA architecture. "A lot of people have been speculating that Oracle is backing away from the NC space," he said. "There may be some evidence of that today. You have to question where they're going to go with that."
Whatever NCA's ultimate destiny, Oracle is clearly tying Java to the success of the company's own software. That software -- applications, database servers, and application servers -- is used by more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies, according to Oracle's own figures, a fact which would seem to grease the skids for bringing Java successfully into the enterprise.
By tying Java to its software, Oracle says it will shore up the language in some of its weakest areas: security, stability, transaction support, and cross-platform portability. "Java is a style whereby you write applications," CEO Larry Ellison said Wednesday. "But it is not complete. No one's really got enterprise scalable, fault-tolerant, server-side Java -- including Sun. That's why Sun is supporting us."
While Sun officials were absent Wednesday, the company issued a supporting statement from CEO Scott McNealy. "Oracle's strong commitment to Java is helping businesses take Java into the enterprise," it read in part.
It might be charged, however, that while claiming to bring true platform independence and ubiquity to Java, Oracle is simply tying the language to its own software, much in the same way that Microsoft offered developers a way to write more powerful Java applications -- as long as they wrote them for the Windows platform. Jarvis denies this, emphatically.
"We're not in this to lock Java to our database," he said. "We're in this to make Java succeed." The difference, Jarvis maintains, is in Oracle's broad reach. Unlike Windows, "Oracle runs on every major platform out there ... We think a database is the integration point for everything."
Besides, he added, Microsoft is changing Java by building it to run on Windows. "We're not changing Java."
So where does all this leave Oracle and its once-ballyhooed Network Computer?
"The battle of the NC really has been won," Jarvis said. "We forced the price of the PC down to a price that the average person can afford." That's about as positive a spin as you could hope for on a product considered by most to have been a loser from the start. Jarvis demurs.
"Where you're first going to see the NC is in set-top boxes," he said. "Funnily enough, we thought it was going to be in the corporate environment."
Zona's Rappaport doesn't buy Jarvis' claim that ushering in the sub-$1,000 PC is a "victory" for the network computer. "The very thing that sits on PCs is the thing they hate, and that is Windows."
Nevertheless, Jarvis said, whatever the form of the thin client -- browser on a PC, network computer, or set-top box -- the important element is the database server delivering information to these devices. Today's strategy, he said, further solidifies the network computing architecture that Oracle envisioned a few years back.
Jarvis said it will standardize Java, to boot. "Our unique ability is to get a piece of software [Java] on millions of servers." Standards, he said, succeed by being installed on millions of computers.
