PRESS RELEASE -- Extending its technology lead in an expected $11 billion application server market, Oracle Corp., the largest provider of software for e-business, today announced the forthcoming availability of Oracle9i Application Server, featuring patent-pending Web cache technology that dramatically increases Web site performance and scalability. E-businesses can expect impressive capacity improvements, starting with a single instance of Oracle9i Application Server on inexpensive hardware. The Oracle Store, for example, has seen more than 100-fold improvement in throughput, with a 70% decrease in back-end server load, since deploying Oracle9i Application Server.

Oracle9i Application Server is the evolution of Oracle Internet Application Server 8i. Its advanced cache technology takes the pressure off of busy Web sites by storing and load balancing frequently accessed Web pages in memory, whether the pages are statically or dynamically generated. As a result, Oracle9i Application Server can service up to 7,500 HTTP requests per second on a single 2-CPU machine, whereas most dynamic Web sites require hundreds of Web servers to sustain this level of throughput.

To produce sustained quality of service during peak times, Oracle9i Application Server's patent-pending surge protection technology provides consistent cache performance even during traffic spikes or if Web site content is changing frequently. Competing Web cache products do not offer the same level of performance guarantee, and force customers to rely on expensive and complex content delivery tools to propagate content updates to their caches. In addition, these content delivery tools cannot handle the volume of content updates demanded by today's leading dynamic Web sites.

Unlike legacy cache products that were designed to cache static content only, the Web caching technology in Oracle9i Application Server was built from the ground up to cache dynamically-created Web pages, regardless of which page generation technology is used. Dynamic Web pages, such as Java Server Pages, Microsoft Active Server Pages, and CGI (Common Gateway Interface), can be computationally intensive to generate and until Oracle9i Application Server were considered un-cacheable. Another key feature of Oracle9i Application Server will give IT departments and content distribution services the flexibility to deploy their Web caches locally and/or globally to the edges of the Internet, bringing the content closer to the customer for additional availability and even better response time.

"Oracle's new Web cache technology puts Oracle in the position of offering the ability to cache both static and dynamic Web pages within the application server," said Steve Garone, vice president at IDC. 'This, combined with the load balancing enhancements of Oracle9i Application Server, will allow customers to more effectively scale through the application server. This offers the potential of supporting ever-increasing numbers of users, and without the need for additional and expensive computing resources."

New Features of Oracle Portal, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Discoverer Viewer
Oracle9i Application Server also offers new features that improve upon Oracle Portal, systems management and business intelligence services. The Oracle9i Application Server Portal feature offers improvements for building and managing enterprise portals, including the new portal framework, which integrates and centrally manages distributed applications, information and services. Oracle9i Application Server Discoverer offers integrated business intelligence capabilities in the middle-tier, helping to ensure that information necessary to make business decisions is available on demand to everyone in an organization.

Finally, the latest version of Oracle Enterprise Manager provides single-console management for the entire Oracle9i platform, extending its capabilities from the client, to the application server, to the database. With its new enhancements, Oracle Enterprise Manager is the first integrated management console to manage all components of Oracle's Application Server, including the Oracle HTTP Listener powered by Apache Web server.

"Oracle continues to improve quality of service, advancing its technology to ensure web content is always current, always available and served up quickly to end users," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of Server Technologies at Oracle Corporation. "It's as simple as adding Oracle 9i Application Server to any database-driven Web site -- businesses receive magnitudes of improved performance, scalability and availability."

Availability
Oracle9i Application Server is scheduled to be available in October 2000 on the major UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems.