Oracle e-mail raises online stakes

Mark Jarvis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Oracle Corp., arrived in Korea yesterday to promote the company's new e-mail management service, Collaboration Suite. Referring to his company's main competitors, Mr. Jarvis said customers would willingly switch to new e-mail services if there were substitutes offering better value and services. The e-mail market is dominated by Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook Express and IBM Corp.'s Lotus software programs. But Mr. Jarvis said Oracle's new product had a competitive edge over both, as it could manage e-mail, voice mail, Internet meetings and other files in one program. A decade ago, Microsoft beat out other firms, launching MS Office, a program that converged word processing, presentation and calculation programs into one, Mr. Jarvis said. He said Oracle was using the same strategy by introducing a combined e-mail management program that would compete with Microsoft's product. Mr. Jarvis stressed that companies could cut labor and management costs by using Oracle's product. In contrast to Outlook or Lotus, which allow one server to manage 300 to 500 workers, Oracle's program enables a computer server to manage up to 30,000 workers, Mr. Jarvis said. He said the price of Collaboration was about one third of Microsoft's Outlook Express. Responding to questions about the information and technology industry, Mr. Jarvis predicted it would start a slow recovery this year, with a full recovery next year. He said Korea's information technology was "very mature," and complemented other core industries, such as steel. He said steel giant Posco had set a good example in Korea by adopting high technology to streamline operations. by Choi Ji-young