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Oracle VP Robert Shrimp on Enterprise Search

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the irrational-hatred-of-file-folders dept.

garzpacho writes "BusinessWeek interviews Robert Shrimp on the enterprise search market. Shrimp talks about about the importance of corporate search, addresses what some claim is Oracle's lateness to the arena and takes a few shots at competitors: 'Our main competition is the filing cabinet...The manila file folder is the ultimate enemy.'"

11 comments

  1. If you don't like shrimp on enterprise search... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    ..try the Paul Allen chow mein

  2. Welcome by daddyrief · · Score: 2, Funny

    I, for one, welcome our new crustacean overlord.

    --
    "Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
  3. Like Lifestreams? by Keen+Anthony · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's interesting that Shimp says Oracle's main competition is the file cabinet. I wonder if he's just being figurative, or if he sees Oracle as steering us away from the desktop metaphor and its information management problems, and moving toward something instantly contextual like David Gelernter's Lifestreams where information is queried as a contextual, time-ordered stream using filters. Hopefully, it'll be more than just simply indexing labels and keywords.

    1. Re:Like Lifestreams? by Vo0k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      He just says there's a huge piece of market for enterprise databases that is untapped because the databases are in paper form.
      Oracle is probably the strongest player in the traditional old enterprise database market - just the style of databases that was always managed as filing cabinets. Others are strong in different "edge" application of databases - www, scheduling, fora. Great most of MySQL installs is used to serve webpages, manage phpbb, image galleries online etc. You'll hardly ever see hospital holding patient records in MySQL, a banking firm doing the customers' accounting in it, local government filing the land deeds with such. That's the Oracle's primary market. And that's the market where still paper files rule. So Oracle doesn't want to compete with other electronic databases for odd applications like factory machine driving, choices table for autopilot or blog entries storage. It's for enterprises to manage the enterprise data - customers, employees, salaries, sales, storage. And this is where paper records rule and compete with Oracle.

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
    2. Re:Like Lifestreams? by mangu · · Score: 1
      I agree with everything you said about MySQL not competing with Oracle, but I think Postgres is coming near. Postgres is to Oracle what Clayton Christensen called a "disruptive innovation". Today, I would recommend Postgres instead of Oracle to any corporation whose database isn't big enough to justify having a team of DBAs fully dedicated to it.


      I work in a small company (about 200 employees) and we do not have a full-time DBA. We have IT people who are trained to support Oracle, but they do other things most of the time. Oracle runs rather smoothly, so you don't need to maintain it very often, but when it does require maintainance, it's a real PITA.

    3. Re:Like Lifestreams? by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      Today, I would recommend Postgres instead of Oracle to any corporation whose database isn't big enough to justify having a team of DBAs fully dedicated to it.
      And since Oracle can't compete with Postgres, it competes with file cabinets :) If the institution was still using paper files instead of computers, there's a good chance they will be clueless enough to move to Oracle instead of Postgres :)

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
  4. The man's name is Robert Shimp. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2, Informative

    Embarrassing. The man's name is Robert Shimp, not Shrimp, as it says in the Slashdot story.

    1. Re:The man's name is Robert Shimp. by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 1
      Embarrassing. The man's name is Robert Shimp, not Shrimp, as it says in the Slashdot story.

      Very embarrassing. After all, we all know that Curly was the better stooge. Good thing his name wasn't Curly Joe... or Joe Besser.

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      That is all.
  5. Not surprising, really. by WidescreenFreak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This isn't that much of a surprise that he considers the manilla envelope/folder to be the enemy. One of Oracle's strengths has always been as a data warehouse. From their perspective, any data that's stored in on envelopre or folder is something that can be archived digitally. Of course, archiving digitally, and thus becoming the "paperless" office that many tout but never implement, means revenue dollars for Oracle. After all, something has to archive all of that data. The more people who store their data in folders and envelopes, the less likely Oracle is to sell to that company as a data warehouse solution. So, naturally a folder or envelope is a threat to their business model.

    And once that data is archived, a searching function to quickly (if not sooner) go through and accurately return the document that it thinks you're looking for is absolutely critical. I can't imagine a more problematic scene for an IT shop than to have the users come back and say, "Well, that's great. But how do I find what I want now?" (And I'm not talking about the "Which key is the Any key?" users.) I've seen the ability (or rather inability) to do an accurate search become a majorheadache for many imaging and data warehouse installs.

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    The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
  6. I hear... by sharkey · · Score: 1

    that the Jefferies Tubes are a good place to make a clandestine Enterprise search.

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    "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.