Ellison resumes attack on Microsoft ‘servers everywhere’

Larry Ellison was singing his new anti-NT song again yesterday at Gartner Group's Symposium/Itexpo in Florida. Fresh from attacking networks with "servers everywhere" in his Internet World keynote (Ellison takes aim at Microsoft crown jewels), Ellison is calling for a return to the centralised computing model, and the abandonment of the distributed approach favoured by Microsoft. His goal is to establish the ultimate in thin client computing, a world where all of the data and the apps run on a few big servers that are easy to control and administer, and where the only thing the client user needs to access the lot is a browser. This pitch favours Oracle's old allies, the Risc vendors, and swipes at Microsoft's notion of having a lot of distributed server power across the organisation (running NT, naturally), and scaling it up via clustering, and via increasing the number of processors supported in single systems. The Microsoft model also requires a lot of horsepower at the client end running applications, and Microsoft's halfway house between centralised and distributed is intended to keep the data centrally, and cache it and run the apps locally. Which is a scheme that makes Larry sound sane. Ellison told the adoring Florida audience that "servers everywhere" was costing a fortune in terms of administration and information fragmentation. He doesn't appear to have said how we're going to break out of this cycle directly, but appears to envisage the increased communications offered to organisations by the Internet as driving increased centralisation. And he may be right. ® Click for more stories