After two unsuccessful forays into the collaboration market, Oracle is back with the next generation of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Gartner believes Beehive is unlikely to be any more successful than past efforts…

I congratulate Oracle for actually releasing a product, rather than just the marketing PowerPoint presentations, however this is becoming a crowded market already- Lotus Notes, MS SharePoint as the big giants and with most companies already undertaking or have done a collaboration initiative, why look at this product from a database manufacture?

I do remember in the late 90’s, it was impossible to land at an airport in the US without seeing the Oracle advertisements for a collaboration suite…..I can’t even remember what it was called now…..Obviously made that much impact in the market.

What makes a product successful?

To me there are a number of things:

- A technology road map, so the purchaser is confident that there’s a future- Confidence
- Price
- Have the ‘wow’ factor- Everyone remembers their first Google moment.
-Integration with other applications…Office, business applications –CRM, Great Plains, BI…….XML can only go so far
-Ease of deployment……Sorry IBM Websphere
-A community behind it- The evangelical user base who are bloggerss, developers, businesses, and employees

Oracle misses the mark on several fronts.