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Oracle formally enters the productivity suite market, targeting Microsoft and Google
Thursday, December 23, 2010 by Angela Ashenden
Last week, Oracle announced the release of two new office productivity suite offerings designed to compete head on with Microsoft Office and Google Docs in the enterprise market. Oracle Open Office 3.3 is the latest update to Oracle’s own version of the open source, on-premise software that it acquired as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2009, which adds enhancements such as third-party integration, as well as a wrapper of Oracle support services, to the core open source software. Oracle Cloud Office, in contrast, is a new on-premise or on-demand (SaaS) offering developed in-house at Oracle which provides browser-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications, with collaborative editing functionality and mobile access. The two are collectively referred to as “Oracle Office”, with integration between the two suites and shared support for the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.
What I found particularly interesting was the relative lack of fanfare with which the new products were announced, especially given the press attention that the battle over the future of OpenOffice.org sparked just a few weeks ago. It will be interesting to see how these new (or rebranded) products are received – clearly with the Sun backdrop, Oracle has a head start in what would otherwise be a brand new market for the company, but it has never had a great deal of success in the enterprise collaboration market, and it is entering a market where there is already a vast array of competition, both on-premise and online. The other question of course relates to what happens next with OpenOffice.org and the splinter community Libre Office, although I suspect that will take much longer to play out.
I plan to write about this in more detail in a report to be published in the new year, so stay tuned.
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Posted in Collaboration