Challenger to Office 2010 also emerged at Oracle Open World
Little noticed amid the big news at Oracle Open World 2010 — of the Exalogic and Exadata combined Oracle hardware/software beasts — Oracle also took aim at a top seller for Microsoft, Office 2010. At the convention, which was held this past week in San Francisco, Oracle also touted the coming Oracle Cloud Suite to take on not just Microsoft, but also the upstart Google Docs. But it may not be the hit Oracle portrays it as.
Oracle Cloud Suite, first teased in January, is still not ready for prime time, but was ready for at least an online demo posted during OOW, and there were a couple of sessions on it in the schedule for attendees. Oracle Cloud Suite is “right on the edge” of being released, said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, according to a report by International Business Times.
Cloud Suite is the online version of Open Office, the open source suite of word processing, presentations and the like owned by Sun Microsystems until its acquisition by Oracle. Oracle Cloud Suite operates through a Web browser, enabling online editing and sharing of documents and other content by collaborators wherever they may be. As such, it competes against Google Docs and the browser version of Office, Microsoft Office Web Apps. The narrator in the Oracle Cloud Suite video touts the integration with Oracle Open Office (natch), the open document format (ODF) and its compatibility with Microsoft Office. It also shares some of the collaboration features of Microsoft SharePoint. And Oracle Cloud Suite is accessible to the industry’s increasing mobile workforce.
“Oracle Cloud Office solves the number one problem every user with a second device like a smartphone or tablet knows, as your data is online, it’s always there, on any device,” he says.
But the International Business Times piece raises a few questions about how viable the Oracle threat is. Writer Carl Bagh notes that Oracle Cloud Suite is built on JavaFX, Sun’s platform for Rich Internet Application development. “The closed nature of JavaFX can block the development of Cloud Office Suite, as it will not be able to create an ecosystem of developers around its platform,” he writes. More to the point, Oracle would be competing against established platforms from Microsoft and Google, as well as IBM’s Lotus Suite of products.
While Oracle would like to own the stack as in its play for hardware and software engineered together in Exalogic and Exadata, Oracle Cloud Suite may be harder for it to fit in.
