Oracle & Mozilla : Silent Partnership

The Mozilla Foundation and Oracle are working together on Mozilla Lightning. The project, aiming to integrate Mozilla's calendar application, Sunbird, with its e-mail application,Thunderbird, is believed to be key to cracking the market dominance of Microsoft Outlook. Cnet.com spculateswhether Oracle plans to to release an open-source collaboration product through this working arrangeent. Oracle's main motivation in working with Mozilla on the Lightning project is likely to be creating a competitor to Microsoft Outlook-and ultimately take market share away from Exchange. In real terms, the Exchange monopoly is based on the Outlook monopoly. People pay shed-loads of cash for Exchange. The thinking is that if Oracle can provide an alternative to Outlook, it will make Microsoft worried.

Oracle's work with Mozilla could help it achieve a long-term goal of success in the collaboration software market. Oracle has been trying hard to entrench itself in the collaboration space for a long time. Collaboration and communications area is critical as it is seen as a control point in the enterprise. Microsoft's success is predicated on Outlook to a significant degree. Forrester earlier recommended that Oracle take the opensource route to compete with Microsoft and IBM, as these two players are well entrenched in the collaboration space. It is possible that due to the risks of releasing the source code of its current product, Oracle is instead planning on offering support for both proprietary and open-source collaboration tools. Oracle has made substantial investments in moving the database platform to the Linux operating system and it is imperative that it has a messaging platform running in Linux platform as an important element in the stack.Interesting development to watch.