Friend or foe?: Wireless operators unsure how to react to new Oracle company

Oracle last week introduced OracleMobile.com, a subsidiary billed as a consumer wireless Internet portal. Reactions around the industry have been mixed as the wireless market tries to sort out exactly which companies OracleMobile.com might compete against with the new services.

OracleMobile.com's offering will be different from other mobile portals because it will integrate different types of services, said Larry Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle. "The aggregation is extremely important. You can go from the review of a book to buying a book," he said.

The solution will be based on Motorola's Mobile Internet Exchange platform, which consists of communications gateways and applications such as e-mail, calendars and address books as well as text-to-speech and speech recognition engines. With all those capabilities tied to content pulled together by OracleMobile.com, users can read a book review on an informational site and then buy the book from Amazon.com, for example. Or, they can schedule an appointment in the calendar and automatically receive a reminder as the meeting nears.

In addition to consumers with Web-enabled phones, who can access the Web site for free or premium information, OracleMobile.com is targeting businesses and wireless operators. OracleMobile.com business and operator customers can buy the platform outright or work with OracleMobile.com on a service bureau basis.

A business would work with OracleMobile.com to make internal information and services available to employees from an internal Web site. "You'd think of us as an [application services provider] in that sense," Ellison said.

OracleMobile.com hopes to rely on Motorola to market the offering to wireless operators, which could deliver a branded version to customers.

While OracleMobile.com might have an advantage in signing up content partners because many of them already use Oracle for their own Internet businesses, the wireless operator community is a different story.

"Clearly if you're an eBay or an Amazon and you have a business built around Oracle databases, it seems like Oracle certainly has an advantage," said Barney Dewey, consultant for the Andrew Seybold Group. But in the case of wireless operators that don't have any data that already resides on an Oracle database, the issues are a bit different, he said.

A bigger problem for Oracle than just breaking into the wireless operator community may be its approach of chasing a number of different types of customers. "It's a shotgun play," Dewey said. "Trying to go after all those things at the same time is problematic. It puts them in a competitive position with some of the people they're trying to sell the product to." Operators may wonder why they should hire OracleMobile.com if OracleMobile.com's Web site is already attracting its wireless customers.

"Oracle is going against the operators and doing a flank attack by capturing customers on its own portal," said Ben Linder, vice president of marketing for Phone.com.

Oracle executives repeatedly set OracleMobile.com as a competitor to Phone.com, an assertion that Linder disagrees with. OracleMobile.com may compete with Phone.com's MyPhone portal offering, but it doesn't offer the gateways, application servers or browsers that Phone.com specializes in, he said.

Instead, OracleMobile.com will gather and convert content from the Internet to wireless handsets - a service officials claim is an advantage over Phone.com, which does more work rewriting content for wireless devices. But an operator could choose Phone.com's solution to route to an Internet based service, such as eBay or Amazon, which may be based on OracleMobile.com's platform, Dewey noted. The carrier and the customer won't care.

Undoubtedly, the process of choosing gateways and portals and deciding how to price services will take some time for operators. "It's going to take three to four years to playout," said Murali Narayanan, director of applications and marketing for Motorola's Internet and connectivity solutions division.

One thing remains certain: Operators must invest in these data platforms to avoid playing the same role as landline ISPs. "Carriers are afraid they will become like the ISPs," Narayanan said. Instead, they want to pursue a model like America Online where they can add value in addition to providing connectivity.