Oracle Beehive and HP database machine set OpenWorld buzzing

Terry Olkin, chief architect and vice president, Oracle Server Technology, described it as a comprehensive, open-standards-based enterprise collaboration platform, designed to deliver integrated team workspaces, calendar, instant messaging and e-mail. “Oracle Beehive is the first truly integrated collaboration platform that understands diverse modes of collaboration through a unified object model,” he said. “Beehive’s robust security model and an open, integrated and extensible set of collaboration services will transform the way organizations collaborate.” Unravelling that, it’s about enabling manufacturing companies and others to secure communications and add collaboration right into their existing business processes and applications. It’s also about helping users to do so while simplifying their computing environments, cutting cost and risk, and improving flexibility, according to the company. Olkin explained that, by using a unified object model and taking advantage of the security capabilities in the Oracle Database, Beehive provides a centralised, secure and auditable collaboration platform that works, right out to ensuring regulatory compliance. Add that to the database giant’s introduction of the HP Oracle Database Machine, delivering a claimed tenfold increase in performance compared with current Oracle data warehouses, and it’s clear that the organisation still believes there’s mileage in building a better mousetrap. It’s probably right, too: with data rates and quantities still escalating, the market for extreme performance data warehouses is almost certainly growing. So providing a grid of Oracle database servers with a grid of the new Oracle Exadata storage servers, all packaged in a single rack, will sound attractive to many. Particularly when you hear that the order of magnitude speed hike is achieved by shipping less data through larger pipes – and that no changes are required to your existing queries or business intelligence applications to deliver that extreme performance.