"WE’RE not making announcements on things to come out years after, we’re here to present things that you can have now—for free. That’s why we call it ‘.Now’ as opposed to ‘.Net’ which is actually a five-year vision.’’

This statement, with stress on the words "now" and "free," was whispered by Oracle Systems Philippines Inc.’s solutions manager for e-business solutions Joseph Benjamin R. Ilagan to two IT reporters while an Oracle global teleconference on the first online development environment for building, testing and deploying hosted applications was ongoing.

Ilagan’s statement adds froth to the Internet battle brewing between the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) strategy and Microsoft.Net. Ilagan admitted that Oracle had not been strong in the developer base, adding that in the past developers were charged for using Oracle products.

"Now, if you are a developer, you can get all our products for free from the Web,’’ he said.

OTN, claims Oracle, will become the first Developer Service Provider (DSP) to offer application developers two free hosted Internet services to build on Oracle 9i. These are the Oracle Portal Online Studio for developing and deploying portals and OracleMobile Online Studio for developing and deploying hosted wireless applications.

Oracle further explained that instead of purchasing, installing and maintaining a complete enterprise hardware and software deployment infrastructure at their own site, OTN developer-members can now log on from any computer, and quickly develop, test and deploy their enterprise-portal, wireless content and application services.

Microsoft’s .Net strategy, on the other hand, claims to provide the right platform to make personalization and integration of the Web services easier for e-businesses and end-users. It is targeted for complete rollout by the end of 2002. Microsoft said that its roadmap calls for transforming its software into services available via subscription over the Net.

Oracle further revealed its plans to continue to outpace Microsoft in the race for developers’ preference in software, and now hosted Internet services. Both Oracle and Microsoft have positioned themselves as technology providers to dot-coms.

OTN boasts of having more than 1.2 million developer members who can now log on from any computer.

During the Dec. 12 teleconference, Oracle Corp. senior vice president for marketing Jeremy Burton predicted that by 2002, OTN would reach over two million developer members followed by Microsoft.Net with a little over 1.5 million members. Sun/Java will have almost 1 million developer members.

Oracle claims that its OTN is growing at a fast rate of over 68,000 members a month.

Oracle Philippines encourages Filipino developers to try it, since it is for free. Oracle stressed that it’s only when developers deploy that they are asked to pay for licenses. Developers, said Oracle, can simply register online, write, test and publish their portlets or mini-portals.

Through an Oracle Portal Development Kit, developers can build their portlets on their own PC, register their URL with Oracle Portal Online studio and paste their portlets onto the Portal Studio page, on OTN, to see how they look. Oracle explained that once an application is published by the developer, it is immediately accessible by any browser.

The software industry is observed to be leaning toward hosted Internet services as the "predominant deployment model.’’

Oracle explained that rather than software developers giving their customers CDs to install and configure, software will be delivered as a hosted service. Observers note that this change will dramatically affect the way developers build, test and sell their content and applications.

It is further noted that a hosted development environment is becoming increasingly attractive to developers because it protects them from having to install and configure complex Internet server software and additional hardware to test their applications on.