Ellison betting on speed of Oracle

By ADAM GIFFORD

SAN FRANCISCO - Billionaires like bets, as one of the biggest billionaires of all, Larry Ellison, showed yesterday.

At Oracle Open World in San Francisco, Mr Ellison said his software company would pay $US1 million ($2.37 million) to any commercial website that was unable to triple the performance of its website by shifting from an IBM or Microsoft database to Oracle's 8i database combined with its newly released Oracle 9i Application Server software.

"I think our money's safe," Mr Ellison said.

"We think we can run sites at least 10 to 50 times faster."

And in a a classic piece of the Microsoft-bashing Mr Ellison is notorious for, he offered $US10 million to anyone who could get any standard enterprise application, such as SAP, Peoplesoft or Oracle's own ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite, to run on the application server and database Microsoft uses for transaction processing benchmarking tests.

Just to rub it in, he demonstrated the benchmarking application running on a four-computer Microsoft cluster compared with a cluster of computers running Oracle on the Linux operating system.

When one of the four computers in the Oracle cluster was literally blown up, performance dropped but there were no transaction failures.

When a similar fate befell one of the computers running Microsoft, the whole application stopped.

These party tricks, and promises Oracle has made to cut $US2 billion off its operating expenses and increase profit margins to 40 per cent, seemed to cause some consternation in the sharemarket.

Oracle's share price dropped from $US78.75 to $69.50 on Tuesday, reducing Mr Ellison's personal stake in the company he founded from $55 billion to just under $50 billion. The share price has been as high as $92 this year.

"I'm a man of modest means. I can live on $50 billion," Mr Ellison told journalists after his keynote speech.

"When I said we could save $1 billion last year, lots of people said I was crazy. We saved a billion dollars. We will save another billion. That is in our control. What happens on the stock market on a daily basis is beyond me."

Mr Ellison said elements within 9i had been in development for 10 years, including the ability to increase the performance of computer systems by adding more computers to a cluster.

Most clustering techniques require reconfiguration of applications and databases, which can take months.

The new Oracle technology allows each computer to access the complete database, improving reliability.

Mr Ellison said the design goals for 9i was systems using the application server and database should be able to cope with one million simultaneous users, one million web page views a second and one million database transactions a second.

As a comparison, the Oracle 8i application server could serve up 50 page views a second.

"The first reaction we had was, 'Get the name of his pharmacist; he's obviously on something'," Mr Ellison said.

"Why did we set the bar this high? Software, as it migrates to the internet, is soon going to become a service. People won't buy computers and software; many customers will turn to application service providers. They would have very demanding requirements, and 9i had been designed to handle this generation and the next."

* Adam Gifford attended Oracle World in San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.