Oracle future plans fail to excite users

Oracle has given a guarded response to a survey of UK Oracle User Group members which showed that users are concerned more with maximising the performance of existing systems than with future releases and developments.

Oracle's own Manufacturing, Office, and Human Resources software products came bottom of the list of important technology areas in the survey.

The survey, which will be debated at the group's annual meeting in November, showed that Oracle users were far more interested in the company's plans in the areas of performance tuning and systems management than in the highly hyped areas of the Internet, multimedia, and business process re-engineering.

Zag Ashgar, commercial director of the user group, said the results of the survey were unexpected. 'I thought issues such as Internet and object-orientation would be right up there.

'It seems users are far more down-to-earth than that, and want vendors to focus on improving the way they use their tools and the support and services provided. They are not interested in having to migrate to new releases or purchase additional tools.'

Philip Crawford, managing director of Oracle UK, said: 'I think you always have to be very careful with statistics like these. For example, if you ask an audience of business analysts what their most crucial IT issues are, they would be completely different to that suggested by an audience of database administrators.

'In reality, our customers ask us for a combination of all sorts of things. They are extremely interested in getting the best out of their existing systems, for example performance management, but they are also just as interested in our strategic direction and future products.'