At a press conference on Monday at Comdex Fall 2001, Larry Ellison derided Microsoft"s Exchange e-mail servers as unreliable and insecure. He said Oracle is offering an e-mail server option for its 9i database management software along with a migration program to move companies from Exchange to Oracle"s database.
With the new e-mail software, Oracle executives say they are not interested in competing with Microsoft"s Outlook e-mail client software. Instead, the company is targeting Microsoft"s Exchange server software that manages e-mail messages.
"We don"t want people to migrate from Microsoft e-mail. We want people to throw out Microsoft Exchange for a server that works," Ellison said.
Jeremy Burton, Oracle"s senior vice president of marketing, claimed Oracle"s e-mail software is more secure and more reliable than Microsoft Exchange, because it rides atop Oracle"s database software, which contains technology to make it more fault-tolerant. Oracle executives said a single Oracle e-mail server can support 10,000 users, allowing companies to replace multiple Exchange servers with a single Oracle server. The company can use one Oracle database server--equipped with the application-server software--to store all of its e-mail.