Oracle aims at Microsoft with upgraded Beehive collaboration

Oracle Corp. today announced enhancements to its recently launched Beehive collaboration software in hopes of positioning it more strongly against long-established offerings from Microsoft Corp. and IBM.

Oracle also slashed its entry-level price for Beehive by more than half, while announcing prices for a cloud-based version.

Oracle announced Beehive at last September's OpenWorld conference. It replaces the Oracle Collaboration Suite.

According to independent analyst Peter O'Kelly, Beehive represents Oracle's fourth attempt to crack the collaboration market, which has been long dominated by Microsoft and its Exchange and SharePoint products, and IBM with its Lotus Notes and Domino software.

Last updated in 2005, Collaboration Suite "failed to put a dent in the universe," O'Kelly wrote in a blog at Beehive's launch last fall.

SharePoint, meanwhile, has 100 million licensed users, according to Microsoft.

Despite its late entrance to the market, Oracle's senior vice president of collaboration technologies David Gilmour asserts that things will be different for Beehive.

"The market leaders are groupware products that have grown up," he said. "Collaboration was layered on after the fact, not designed that way in the beginning. Beehive is almost the complete inverse of that."

Gilmour was CEO of collaboration vendor Tacit Software Inc. Tacit offered a cutting-edge "expertise location" platform that tracked employees' usage to build a profile of their expertise that could be found by other employees.

Tacit was acquired by Oracle in November.

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