Apple, Oracle Plan Database Road Show

Late last week, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) posted information about an international "road show" designed to publicize Mac OS X Server's compatibility with Oracle's (Nasdaq: ORCL) 10g database platform.

The road show will feature executives from both Oracle and Apple and will run in five cities: London; Paris; Tokyo; Reston, Virginia; and Apple's home base of Cupertino, California. With the exception of July's Tokyo show, the stops all will take place in June.

Apple declined to specifically comment to MacNewsWorld on the alliance with Oracle. The Apple Web site invites Oracle customers seeking a lower-cost platform, Apple customers looking for a robust database platform and independent providers that want to enter the grid-computing market to attend the road show.

Pricing for 10g will remain the same as with other platforms on which the solution runs. The database comes in several versions, including Lite (US$100 per user) and Personal ($400 per user), which are aimed at developers and do not require a processor license. Standard and Enterprise version licenses start at $4,995 per processor and range upward to $40,000 per processor.

"Xserve is a hot box, though it has had most of its success to date in high-performance computing," Illuminata senior analyst Gordon Haff told MacNewsWorld.

Oracle Supporting Apple

Doug Kennedy, vice president of platform alliances at Oracle, confirmed to MacNewsWorld Oracle's plans to provide a version of 10g for Mac OS X. Kennedy added that the 10g port to OS X came about as a result of analyzing Oracle's customer base as well as working with Apple's customers.

"10g is the flagship driving grid computing at Oracle," Kennedy said. "We released it for the OS X layer, so it is not limited to use on OS X except in meeting hardware requirements."

Oracle is not a newcomer to Apple, he pointed out. "We released Oracle 9i in June 2003. The driver behind that was a developer's release of 9i that saw a significant number of downloads," he said.

"We always investigate markets before moving into a vertical industry," Kennedy continued. "We see opportunities with Apple in the education, entertainment and state and local governments for grid and on-demand computing; however, we are really looking across all markets with this as well."

Significant for the Mac

For his part, David Freund, practice leader for information architecture at Illuminata, said in an interview with MacNewsWorld that Oracle does not move into any market space without considerable opportunity.

Freund said he believes this is significant for Apple.

"This further justifies their gear as [being] suitable for the enterprise," he noted.

Haff added that this is also a move by both firms to gain new ground and perhaps new markets.

"Oracle is very much trying to develop a broader market for clustered databases, and when you're trying to develop a market, you sometimes have to make investments that don't pay off immediately," Haff said. "Apple, too, is willing to invest to get more of a commercial enterprise presence. It's probably a bigger deal for Apple than Oracle, but it does give Oracle another target platform."

A PowerPC Counter to IBM?

"10g brings database capabilities to Apple's grid-computing platform," Kennedy said. "It includes management capacities, which allow users to decide how to spread out database load across a cluster, as well as Oracle's known database features."

Apple's Xgrid, first previewed at last January's Macworld Expo, is a computational clustering technology designed to create a "virtual" IT environment that leverages all hardware resources to run batch and workload commands. The product is presently in beta and available as a free download.

Meanwhile, product literature from Oracle promotes the inclusion of the company's Real Application Cluster technology, which protects database clusters against hardware outages.

Freund believes programmers in the Unix space will recognize that running Oracle on OS X will not be a big leap. According to him, Apple's aggressive pricing on its server solutions "is a head-turner," and he said he thinks Apple's decision to attach itself to Oracle provides it with a proven name in the industry.

"It's also a Power architecture counter to IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Linux on Power push," said Haff. "Not that Oracle won't likely be running on IBM gear, too, but it's a less comfortable relationship given that IBM has its own database in DB2."