Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".

The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "never look a gift horse in the mouth"...

As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was—for Oracle—close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.

So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:

• Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today—Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.


• BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people, assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.


• Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002–05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.


• As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle—and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)

As an interesting footnote for analyst-watchers: at the end of the meeting, the Oracleists said they were "very keen to continue the dialogue". This was fantastic news, given MWD's status with Oracle! But what was behind that? Had they had some kind of road-to-damascus experience about the value of smaller analyst firms? Well, no... it turns out that Oracle's PR team is interested in talking to me as a "blogger"—but this is something separate from my work as an analyst for MWD. MWD is still in the same position as an analyst firm, and it seems I'll need to have a separate relationship with Oracle as an analyst. I'll leave an analysis of what this might mean for how Oracle perceives the relative value of "bloggers" and "analysts" (particularly in light of discussions like this one about what defines an analyst) as an exercise to the interested reader.

It's funny, though: last time I looked, I was just one person... it seems that getting collaboration and conversation right is indeed not about introducing new technology, but about adjusting your culture and organisation.