Sunir K Kapoor, vice president, enterprise messaging and collaboration business, Oracle Corp, USA spoke to Gaurav Patra about the trends in the collaborative applications segment and how it benefits the enterprises user

What exactly is collaborative applications?
Collaborative applications help in migrating your business to real-time at a lower cost. Through collaboration applications one can have real-time collaboration such as online meetings, instant messaging, and co-browsing. With our Collaboration Suite, consolidating your e-mail, calendar and file servers to one integrated suite of applications saves lot of costs for an enterprise.

Oracle Collaboration Suite drives down administration, software, hardware and migration costs. By consolidating corporate data, user productivity increases while IT costs, and time spent on IT, are reduced. In fact, Oracle’s own e-mail implementation saved the company a lot in the first year. Organisations can significantly reduce hardware costs by consolidating hundreds of servers to one, single, secure infrastructure.

What benefits do these applications hold for the customer?
The economics of this is that you can have more applications running with less hardware. You can save some real money through this application. And also one can integrate a number of real-time applications through this. Oracle Collaboration Suite reduces the administration cost, as it requires fewer servers to manage and increases uptime and scalability. RoI studies have also shown that by consolidating communication and information systems onto a minimum number of servers managed centrally, users can save significantly on their IT costs.

Which are the segments you are targeting as far as Collaboration Suite is concerned?
E-mail is one segment that we are definitely targeting. Apart from this, we found out some other industry segments also want to customise their collaborative applications and messaging set up. Although we have solutions for most of the vertical segments, our primary target is large enterprises.

What are upcoming trends in the collaborative application segment?
Basically, I can foresee two major trends in the collaborative segment. One is consolidation. Right now too many enterprises are operating from too many different locations. And sharing of information between these locations is a must. So, integration of all these different applications running at different locations and consolidation of this information at one centre, is definitely one of the major trends in this segment.

The second trend is towards real-time. In this modern age, access to information is vital. Information value is directly related to knowing the information then and there. Information should be available instantly. So, for this collaborative and messaging applications are going to play a critical role. The notion is to take real-time information and integrate that with different applications running on the network.

What are the major strengths of collaborative applications?
We cover almost all the elements in the collaborative environment. Through our solution, customers get access to e-mail, voice mail, and faxes from one integrated inbox, while organisations cut IT costs through e-mail and file server consolidation. Our suit also includes real-time collaboration such as online meetings, instant messaging, and co-browsing. This is also noteworthy that Microsoft Exchange 5.5 customers can migrate to Oracle Collaboration Suite for one-third the cost of migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2000. We are highly innovative as far as our solution is concerned.

What is your strategy for the Indian market?
Like any other geographical area, India is also a very critical market for us. The Indian market has tremendous growth potential. We have tied up with a number of system integrators and value added resellers to provide the best solutions to our customers.

What are your future plans?
We have made some substantial investment in our collaboration application business. We have 500 engineers working on our Collaboration Suite. This is a long-term business for us. We will continue to provide innovative solutions to our customers.