Oracle exhibit highlights skill scarcity, IT literate leaders

By Zatni Arbi

MANILA (JP): To MIS managers and programmers, the name Oracle is as familiar a name as the jeepneys on the streets of Makati.

For many years the company has been supplying corporations industrial-strength database management systems, applications and tools to help database developers build application.

As it also provides consulting, education and support services, the biweekly magazine Fortune places this company among the large world software producers that are still not part of Microsoft's kingdom.

Considered a player in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), it competes with world-class software houses SAP, J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, and Baan, the magazine said.

Well, in case you wonder what in the world is ERP, suffice it to say that ERP is a huge software package that helps huge enterprises manage every aspect of its operations, from accounting to manufacturing, from human resources to financial resources management.

But, at the ASEAN Oracle OpenWorld 98 Exhibition and Conference in Manila last week, this leading supplier of information management tools also made it clear that it belonged to the growing alliance that is challenging Microsoft's domination of the computer industry, particularly in operating systems and applications.

The path that it is taking is Network Computing (NC). Not surprisingly, one of its closest partners is Sun Microsystems, where the Java programming language comes from. We'll have the opportunity to discuss NC and Java in a separate article.

NCs

During the exhibitions at Dusit Nikko in the Makati area, I was able to play around with NCs.

In case you have read somewhere about the NetPC and you wonder what distinguishes NCs from the NetPCs, you need to remember one important thing: The latter is Microsoft and Intel's response to the group's challenge to their architecture.

The main theme you'll hear from the NC camp is "Fat server, thin clients".

What it means is a network where the applications and data are centrally stored and maintained in their respective servers, while the users use sealed, non-user upgradable workstations.

These small boxes, which may have no local hard disk or even diskette drive, have more intelligence than the dumb terminals that we used to use back in the mainframe days.

Again, NetPC is based on the same idea: The users are not given the freedom to install their own software, but they're freed from the chores of backing up their data or scanning their hard disks for viruses. These tasks are done by the network administrator.

In general, the "fat server, thin clients" is a new paradigm that companies including Oracle, Sun Microsystems and others have been trying to introduce to the corporate world.

Several benefits were underscored during the seminars that were part of the OpenWorld 98 program.

The first was the low investment required for procuring the NCs themselves.

Savings would also come in different forms, including the time and effort that would have been needed for upgrading software on the individual end-user PCs in a non-networked environment.

Such a working environment is, of course, an ideal alternative for specific tasks but not in others.

Bank tellers, for example, would not need a Pentium-class machine just to record customers' banking activities such as withdrawals and deposits.

There have also been talks about exploiting NC's advantages to bring Internet connection closer to the masses.

What it would require, I was told, is an Internet-NC server with connection to houses.

Already people in the States have seen the arrival of set-top boxes, carrying a street price of US$199, that allow couch potatoes to access the Internet through their TVs.

Skills Scarcity

Also highlighted during the four-day program was the worldwide crippling scarcity of technically qualified human resource for the information technology (IT) industry.

It was unveiled that 10 percent of the IT jobs in the US cannot be filled, while the industry is expected to grow 10.4 percent over the next five years. Even President Fidel V. Ramos himself was acutely aware of this, and his administration was seriously addressing this problem.

Part of the reason for the Filipino government's keen interest in IT development -- both as producer and user -- stems from the conviction it shares with Andy Grove, Intel's CEO.

Grove said at last year's Asia Pacific forum that IT would be able to help Asian countries affected by the economic turmoil to pull themselves out of their troubles.

The Philippines has been quite lucky because it has been selected as the first country outside the United States to receive assistance that was part of Oracle Academic Initiative.

Oracle has planned a $50 million worldwide program to help speed up the availability of skilled IT workers.

Bugs

In the Philippines, selected schools will receive the necessary hardware and software for the training. And their instructors will receive the necessary training to equip them with the necessary skills, which they will in turn be expected to transfer to their students.

The assistance is worth $1.5 million in total.

One interesting thing about this program is that it doesn't focus on skills in using Oracle's own products, but it is geared toward meeting the needs of the IT industry as a whole.

The program will first concentrate on training programmers to alleviate the year 2000 bugs in COBOL programs.

Once the need for Y2K bug exterminators is over, the program will concentrate on educating students in other specialized areas of the IT industry.

One thing struck me very strongly during this event.

We cannot really envy the Philippines for being the first country to get such assistance, as it is obvious that the leaders of this country are very knowledgeable about IT.

At the welcome ceremony of the Oracle event, President Ramos gave a jovial speech in which he talked about IT with the same depth and accuracy that only a world-class IT CEO could have done slightly better.

Folks, I heard Prime Minister Goh talk about Singapore One at the Asia Telecom 97, and we all know how involved Prime Minister Mahathir has been in the Multimedia Super Corridor program of Malaysia.

The speech by President Ramos that I heard that evening really brought home that it was high time attention toward IT's potential benefits in increasing economic productivity and national competitiveness came from the ranks of our own leaders.