Oracle Beehive Activity Starts Buzzing
David Gilmour, senior vice president, Collaboration Technologies, Oracle.
Oracle Beehive, which quietly launched a year ago this month, and was more noisily celebrated at last fall's OpenWorld, has some additional new functionality updates announced this week.
"As organizations rely increasingly on collaboration software to drive both communication and business process efficiency, repackaged groupware and point solutions are proving to be costly and difficult to manage on an enterprise scale. With its unified platform, Oracle Beehive provides enterprise-ready collaboration in a single, easy-to-manage system with a low total cost of ownership," said David Gilmour, senior vice president, Collaboration Technologies, Oracle.
I had the above 'Open Enterprise 2009' research project video interview with David last week, during which he commented:
“One of the not much talked about subjects that lies behind the enterprise 2.0 discussion is that historically there’s always been a very bright line between the process worker where you are typically working with a business application such as a call center, roll up of general ledger, HCM systems, where the worker is engaged in a process that somebody else has designed but inevitably you hit some problems, road blocks, and we have to step out of that process, go over here, collaborate, leverage other users, be in the much more fluid world of user to user publishing, content creation and interaction...
“...That process of disengaging, collaborating and reengaging is very awkward in many situations, and there is a huge amount of frictional loss that happens back and forth across that boundary”.
The Oracle unified approach is intended to remedy these types of business process issues and are reflected in the updated Beehive team workspace approach that builds on an enterprise-specific security and compliance framework to manage activities and information.
Wikis, team calendaring, RSS support, contextual search, and advanced file sharing can be centrally provisioned or set up by the team with no pre existing portal requirements in this Beehive unified environment.
As discussed last fall a new feature launched this month is enhanced Web and Voice Conferencing with security and content management policies - the expanded service includes on-demand conference recording and retrieval.
Additional integration with existing popular and familiar desktop productivity tools helps eliminate training costs and user adoption challenges, while IT governance will like Beehive’s scalability, security and manageability.
Beehive can be deployed on premise or through Oracle On Demand as Software as a Service.
This is a relatively new product with few case histories or use examples beyond statements reinforcing the above selling points, but there is clearly a requirement and demand for this type of suite approach. This is particularly true with the 'check the boxes' approach IT management are sometimes notorious for taking to satisfy business requirements.
How deep and capable the Beehive offering is around being the hub of the business, the epicenter of activity, and how it competes with the various similar IBM offerings will become clear as the year progresses and usage feedback emerges.