Web services hype is this year's dot-com bubble

The hype surrounding web services is lunacy on a par with the inflated dot-com market of the late nineties according to Oracle boss Larry Ellison.

While admitting it is "dangerous to go against fashion," Ellison stood his ground and warned that the IT industry is over valuing web services in the same way it overrated dot-coms.

"I'm told web services solve all problems in computing. I keep hearing this lunacy. Web services is important but the notion that it will let you link Siebel with SAP with Oracle is ludicrous," he told the crowd at an Oracle conference in Copenhagen yesterday.

Slating the interoperability promises of web services, Ellison said the mobile phone had made it simpler for people to communicate with each other but it hadn't made it any easier for an English speaking person to hold a phone conversation with a French speaker.

The same is true of web services, he said, with the technology serving a function but not necessarily joining different standards as seamlessly as promised.

While Oracle is pushing its J2EE developer programme as a platform for building web services the company has been seen to take a back seat in the field as rivals Sun and Microsoft fight it out to be top dog.

And with markets still shaking from the post-dot-com fall out Ellison warned about jumping on this latest bandwagon.

"It wasn't that long ago that people thought if you took a really stupid business idea and put a Dell internet server with it it became a great idea. Nothing has really changed. People still don't understand what it really is."

While Oracle has faired better than some of its competitors, the database giant is still feeling the effects of the downturn. Recent fourth quarter earnings fell 23 per cent on revenue that was down 12 per cent.

Ellison remained cautious on the future saying IT budgets are still tight, but he is confident Oracle will continue to grow.

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