Oracle, Quark: unlikely bedfellows for e-commerce. (Quark is delivering high fidelity personalized content for Oracle) (Company Business and Marketing)

Immedia as platform for online catalogs?

Faced with increasing competition in the area of Internet commerce, on Oct. 15 Oracle announced grandiose plans to stake its claim in the field.

Building on its July announcement of Internet and intranet solutions, Oracle announced a "merchant server" called Project Apollo, the Oracle Security Server, and a slew of new partnerships, including one with Quark to provide "high-fidelity" authoring of Web commerce sites.

Oracle president Raymond Lane said Oracle had missed the "html publishing stage" of Web development because "it wasn't our business." As the Web moves to database-structured transactions, Oracle realized that "this is the stage we must lead. It is our future."

Oracle founder and ceo Larry Ellison followed with an outline of what he called the three phases of Internet applications.

Phase one covered Web sites intended simply to publish and disseminate information, typically flat-file html documents. "Everyone thought of it as this amazing electronic printing press," Ellison said. According to Ellison, today we're in phase two, where Web sites can generate dynamic documents and offer a degree of collaboration. …