Exchange Replacement

Richard Soule Richard.Soule at oracle.com
Tue Apr 8 13:06:35 EDT 2003


Warning: The below may appear to be too rah! rah! for this list. If
reading about a particular companies point of view with regards to email
might offend you, please press the delete key now.

"Blake, Chris" wrote:
[snip]
> If your going to spend that much, you might as well just buy the real
> Microsoft product rather than a look-alike.

That was pretty funny! Someone on this list is recommending that you
purchase a 'real Microsoft product'. I didn't know there was such a
thing! ;-)

Oracle's 'look-alike' gives users the ability to continue to use
Outbreak as a client if they so choose. That is where the similarities
end.

MS viewed email as a store and forward type of system or a message
propagation problem. Consequently at companies with tens of thousands of
employees you often have hundreds of Exchange servers. Doesn't MS
themselves (also a company with about 40K people) have 400+ Exchange
servers for their employees? [I'm not sure of the exact number, so don't
quote me on that, but it is known to be many hundreds of servers.]

Oracle looked at email as a database problem (probably the way they look
at every problem). If you store everything in a single server you get a
huge number of benefits.

What is easier: Send an email to 400 servers so 40K people can read it
or send a link to a row in a database to 40K people? Catch a virus in
one server or try to stop it in 400? Administer 400 servers or 2? This
list goes on and on, but Oracle has professional marketing folks who
prepare those, I'm just a user.

We used to run multiple email servers (one per country or region) and
when we consolidated them we saved a lot of money:
http://www.oracle.com/customers/9i/oraclecollabsuite.html

It is essentially a completely different way to look at the problem, one
that Oracle thinks is good. It would be impossible for the 'real
Microsoft product' to serve 40K users off of a single server which is
why I mentioned that.

Oh, by the way, the $60/user includes the database. :-) And $60 is a
perpetual license, if you want to buy the software for one year it is
$15/user. Apparently we do the hosting for $10/month per user. Given
that, I'm not quite sure how Oracle is 'so much' that spending the money
on the 'real Microsoft product' is a better idea...

> 
> Chris Blake
> (who has quite a few expensive Oracle databases running)

Why? Why don't you run them all on MySQL? It's cheaper, right?

;-)

[The above is tongue in cheek, in case you didn't get that from the
smiley.]

Rich
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> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
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