ORACLE SLOW TO DELIVER DATA WAREHOUSE TOOL

Oracle Corp.'s drive to expand its data warehousing portfolio is coming up short as the company delays shipment of a new data movement tool.

The database giant will be at least six months late in delivering Warehouse Builder, a complex package for extracting, transforming and loading data from legacy systems, packaged applications and other sources into a data warehouse for analysis, sources said.

Oracle officials, in Redwood Shores, Calif., said the delay is due to improvements needed for handling metadata in distributed environments. They added that the software is already outperforming competing products.

"Oracle has a certain responsibility to bring out quality products, and as such we're a little conservative," said Michael Howard, vice president of the data warehouse program office at Oracle.

However, one source close to the situation said the delay stems from unforeseen complexities the company is facing in writing Warehouse Builder from scratch in Java.

"The problem with Java is, it's slow," the source said. "It's an incredibly complex project. It's more than they can handle right now."

Oracle announced Warehouse Builder last November and originally said it would ship by the end of this month.

The company, however, has yet to release a beta of the software. Officials are now planning to release a beta in May or June, with general availability slated for later this summer.

The delay appears to be hurting Oracle more than its customers. Users building Oracle-based data warehouses have other data movement tools at their disposal from Oracle-certified partners, such as Informatica Corp., Carleton Corp. and Evolutionary Technologies International Inc.

"It's not holding up the show for me--there are plenty of good third-party tools on the market," said Steve Vandivier, president of Avanco International Inc., an Oracle reseller in McLean, Va. "In the old days, Oracle was faulted constantly for putting out products before they were ready. At least here they're putting out a product when it's ready to go--well-tested."

While Warehouse Builder remains under development, Oracle continues to offer data extractors for SAP AG and PeopleSoft Inc. ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications as well as its Oracle Application Data Warehouse, software for creating, maintaining and administering a data warehouse.

Oracle's stalled bid to provide an enhanced end-to-end warehousing solution comes while other data movement vendors are upping the ante with product upgrades and while many IT organizations have already implemented warehouses. The stakes are high, with data movement tools selling for several hundred thousand dollars and often requiring consultants' expertise.

Earlier this month, business intelligence developer Hummingbird Communications Ltd., of North York, Ontario, acquired Leonard's Logic SA, a Paris company with a data movement tool, called Genio.