SAN FRANCISCO — Kicking off its annual OpenWorld user and partner conference in San Francisco Monday, Oracle Corp. formally introduced a collaboration software tool that it said is targeted at large organizations grappling with the problem of collaboration “fragmentation.”
The product, called Oracle Beehive, was announced by Oracle President Charles Phillips during his keynote presentation. Phillips described Oracle Beehive, a successor to Oracle’s Collaboration Suite product, as a “brand new product” for enterprise collaboration that Oracle has been developing for the past three years.
Oracle Beehive encompasses and integrates such functions as team workspaces, calendars, instant messaging, and e-mail using a unified object model that also takes advantage of security capabilities in the Oracle database, officials said. Beehive can be used with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange or Lotus Notes, and can run on Windows, Linux, or Solaris systems. It became available in May to select customers. Oracle is pricing the product, which can be used on-premises as a licensed software product or on-demand, at $120 per user.
Chuck Rozwat, Oracle’s executive vice president of product development, who joined Phillips during his keynote, said the challenge that Beehive is designed to address is the proliferation of disparate collaboration technologies. “The problem is collaboration fragmentation,” Rozwat said. “There are too many databases, security measures, and management [approaches]. Beehive integrates all of these capabilities together.”