Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Oracle launches Cloud Office, eyes Google, Microsoft

By | December 16, 2010, 5:16am PST

Summary: Oracle rolled out Cloud Office, an effort to grab a piece of the online productivity suite pie. If successful, Oracle’s Cloud Office could compete with Google and Microsoft among others. Oracle also launched Open Office 3.3.

Oracle on Wednesday rolled out Cloud Office, an effort to grab a piece of the online productivity suite pie. If successful, Oracle’s Cloud Office could compete with Google and Microsoft among others.

In a statement, Oracle billed its Cloud Office as a Web and mobile suite that “enables Web 2.0-style collaboration and mobile document access.” Cloud Office promises promises compatibility with Microsoft Office and integration with Open Office 3.3, which was also launched Wednesday. On a blog post, Oracle provides a demonstration video and other data.

With the effort, Oracle has built in hooks to its enterprise applications. For instance, Open Office 3.3 connects with Oracle’s business intelligence and E-Business Suite as well as Sharepoint. Like previous versions Open Office is built on the open document format (ODF).

Here’s Oracle’s data sheet on Open Office.

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Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

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Nice
lawtonterri 28th Feb
Fantastic post. Here???s a tool that lets you build your cloud database apps without coding http://www.caspio.com/
When u say Oracle Open Office it is the old StarOffice which has been renamed. This is a commercial version and will have hooks to the Cloud office version.
It is not clear(unlikely) if the free version OpenOffice.org will have hooks to the cloud version.
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How can this win?
x I'm tc 16th Dec 2010
Microsoft will dominate the cloud-based application world because they will be moving Office, the best and most used suite, to the cloud.

Google will be the clear #2 because their suite is free for most users.

Oracle has neither incumbency nor cost advantage to leverage. I see this as a non-starter.
@jdakula
Thanks for such a nice and updated information. I got some interesting tips from this post.
ville di lusso
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So this is a for-fee suite? Hmm. Outside of using this as a "feature-function" bullet on the sales slick for OBIEE, I'm not sure this will get traction against Goog and MS.
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Hurdles
RedVeg 16th Dec 2010
The hurdles are large, and in my opinion, the only way to overcome them is with exceptional functionality and ease of use. I believe that Oracle could provide exceptional functionality, but I have a hard time believing they can nail the ease of use side. Oracle has a history of high performance, high reliability back-ends, and front-ends that are less than user-friendly.
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Presumably they're going to charge for this?
peter_erskine@... 16th Dec 2010
Oracle being Oracle, we know its MONEY they want....
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And what is it that you want?
otaddy 16th Dec 2010
@peter_erskine@...

Is money evil or something like that? Well thanks for not using a $ in your post.
hmmmm that dashboard screen looks an awful lot like Oracle 10/11 DB consoles. Thats not a good thing. For anyone who has maintained oracle databases lets just say oracle is completely clueless when it comes to human factors, ease of use and user friendly. Seriously bad, not just bad location of buttons.
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Great!!! thanks for sharing this information to us!
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Nice
lawtonterri 28th Feb
Fantastic post. Here???s a tool that lets you build your cloud database apps without coding http://www.caspio.com/

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