Oracle’s president Charles Phillips was in London today hosting a discussion on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Amongst a discussion that Dennis Howlett rightly categorizes as “interesting but not earth shattering” probably the most interesting news was that Oracle is in the process of setting up a dedicated Enterprise 2.0 sales force.

The new sales force will swing into action at the beginning of Oracle’s next financial year in June and will be tasked with turning customer interest in, and understanding of, the potential benefits of collaboration into working projects.

Duplicated across Oracle’s regions and reporting to the regional head, the Enterprise 2.0 sales team lead with the WebCenter platform for composite applications, as well as more traditional software products such as Oracle Portal and what was formerly Stellent content management software. Oracle’s Beehive next-generation collaboration platform will also be in the mix, although Charles was less forthcoming about the details of the new enterprise collaboration product.

What he did say is that the Enterprise 2.0 sales force will be made up of both BEA and Oracle sales and consulting experts and will make use of the Oracle Insight Program consulting service to analyze customers’ business processes to identify opportunities for the deployment of internal and external collaborative applications \.

The sales force will engage with both business and IT managers and will have an eye on enabling enterprise-wide strategic adoption of collaborative software, although most of the obvious opportunities are likely to be departmental or focused on specific applications - such as CRM and SCM.

Charles Phillips noted that there is customer interest in Enterprise 2.0, but that a lot of education is still required to turn that into deployments. He said the question he asked customers is “are there groups of people you’d like to collaborate with more easily?”

Given that most companies are interested in the views of their customers and uncovering unfulfilled demand, the answer to that is invariably “yes”, but then the conversation has to move on to identifying business processes that can make use of collaborative technologies and examining use cases. That will be the role of the new sales force.

With customer deployments thin on the ground Charles also shared some details of how Oracle is making use of collaborative technologies. The company is currently working on a new collaborative environment for training partners on its product stack, for example, in recognition that given Oracle’s rapid rate of acquisitions it is difficult and expensive for partners to keep up to date - and difficult and expensive for Oracle to keep its partners up to date.

On the developer side there’s Oracle Mix, which sees the company extending its collaboration with the developer and user communities beyond its user trade shows, and providing an environment where it can quickly respond to customer feedback. Oracle is also using collaborative technologies within its internal developer and sales organizations to make it easier for employees to identify experts and expertise with the organization.

Kathleen recently noted that social enterprise or Enterprise 2.0 software is not a market in and of itself and that the market for internal applications is likely to be dominated by IBM and Microsoft given their dominance in traditional collaboration software. If Oracle is to crack this market, it probably does need to be more proactive about taking the Enterprise 2.0 message to existing and potential customers.

If we assume that Enterprise 2.0 is not a market, then a dedicated Enterprise 2.0 sales force is probably not a long-term strategy. In terms of identifying new collaborative application opportunities the market and pointing customers in the right direction, it does make sense, however.

What did come across in the conversation is that this is designed to be a practical and pragmatic approach that will hand-hold customers into Enterprise 2.0 adoption, rather than just slapping some 2.0 t-shirts on the sales team and sending them off on the back of the bandwagon.

Given his past involvement in the creation of Ingres and Postgres (not to mention Vertica and StreamBase), when Michael Stonebraker starts talking about a new database research project, the world tends to sit up and listen.

Such is the case with H-Store, a new approach to the OLTP database proposed by Stonebraker, along with Samuel Madden at MIT, Daniel Abadi at Yale, and Stan Zdonik at Brown, amongst others.

Details of the H-Store project were presented (PDF) at the VLDB conference in September 2007 but have returned to the agenda in
recent weeks thanks to an online discussion between Curt Monash and Stonebraker.

Monash has also put together a nice Q&A for ZDnet that introduces H-Store from which we learn that Stonebraker “proposes to manage
high-end OLTP databases entirely in RAM, with no disks, no redo logs, little multi-threading, and only optimistic locking. And by the way, he wants to replace SQL with Ruby or Python.”

As you might guess from that description, H-Store calls for a complete re-write of OLTP systems, and it does so on the quite simple premise that current OLTP engines were not designed to run on today’s architectures. “Current OLTP database designs, which date largely from the 1970s, are based on several assumptions about the architecture of database applications and hardware
that are less true today than they were 30 years ago,” states the overview.

The H-Store project contends that for the most part OLTP systems can be run in memory on a shared nothing cluster of machines, and that doing so increases performance. Early results (in the PDF above) indicate that H-Store ran transactions 82x faster than a traditional relational database set-up.

Current OLTP systems were also designed when there as single database market, which brings us back to Monash’s post on the diversity of database management systems and his attempts to categorize them. Monash’s four categories are: high end OLTP (Oracle, DB2…), specialty data warehouse (Teradata, Netezza, Vertica…), mid-range relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, OpenEdge…) and embedded relational (SQL Anywhere, TimesTen).

Although Stonebraker argues there should be two data warehouse sectors (row- and column-based), both agree that H-Store will be positioned squarely at the high-end OLTP category (so going up against Oracle, but only for a portion of what Oracle is currently used for).

So can we expect to see Oracle handing over the OLTP database crown to Stonebraker et al? Perhaps, but not for a very long time to come. As Monash notes in his ZDnet article:

“H-Store lags C-Store [which became Vertica] by about three years, and Vertica started enjoying significant sales late last year, so a first approximation would suggest H-Store will be useful some time in 2010, with the first serious academic prototype being finished late this year. But let’s not assume H-Store will succeed commercially as fast as C-Store did. It’s one thing to adopt a complex-analytics product that will only ever have a handful of actual users, and quite another to bet a super-high-volume OLTP system on unproven technology.”

We will be watching with interest.