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Oracle Sets World Abuzz Over Oracle Beehive

Before a packed crowd of customers and partners, Oracle President Charles Phillips on Monday recapped a year of big accomplishments at Oracle and debuted a new product that is already generating buzz in tech circles.

Oracle Beehive, a built-from-scratch collaboration application, gives customers a new way to communicate and work together on projects. For example, Oracle Beehive can tie together e-mail clients, instant messaging and chat programs, calendars, voice mail, and conferencing applications behind the scenes so users can more easily share and simultaneously work on documents, e-mails, and multimedia files.

"You can start to organize the way you work," Phillips said. "Now we'll take that same concept of a single workspace and expand it to a team workspace."

Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development at Oracle, joined Phillips on stage to demonstrate Oracle Beehive in action. The two showed how Oracle Beehive users can add members to collaboration groups, collaborate on a presentation simultaneously, and store files of various types in a shared workspace.

"Oracle Beehive is a brand new product, built from scratch over the last three years—a new architecture, a new set of products," Rozwat said. "It is a collaboration server."

During his address, Phillips reviewed the major accomplishments of the past year—perhaps most notably the successful acquisition of BEA—and welcomed 1,500 BEA conference attendees into the Oracle family. Including BEA, Oracle has acquired 50 companies in the last 44 months.

Phillips noted that Oracle's growth has always relied on careful, strategic acquisitions. That strategy helped enable a 25 percent growth in 2007, Phillips said, "while other companies were shrinking."

"Being a leader is a cultural thing for us," Phillips said. "We want to be number one in every market we compete in."

Early in his address, Phillips invited eight-time Olympic gold medalist and record-breaking swimmer Michael Phelps to join him on stage. Phelps discussed his rigorous training schedule and diet, while Phillips prompted laughs by comparing Phelps's routine to that of an Oracle developer.

Phillips praised Phelps's dedication to hard work and noted that Oracle developers also work hard every day. In fact, Phillips noted, in the coming year Oracle will invest US$3 billion in research and development of new products and product enhancements across 20,000 developers.