"If the performance doesn't triple, we'll give you a million bucks," Mr Ellison said in an attempt to woo existing IBM and Microsoft customers. The Oracle leader spoke for an hour to thousands of Oracle faithful attending the software giant's annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Ellison later upped the ante by saying he'd give $10 million to anyone who can match Microsoft's published test results running a piece of software, such as an SAP human resources application, on Microsoft's database software. "It's nothing more than a PR stunt," said Mr Barry Goffe, Microsoft's group manager for the .Net developer group.

"It's clear they're scared that we're encroaching in their space. They basically have to scare people to not use our technology." Oracle this week announced plans for its new Oracle 9i database, software that collects and stores corporate and Web information, and a new version of its application server, software that runs e-commerce transactions. Mr Ellison touted the combined products as the fastest, most reliable and easy-to-use technology for companies to take their business to the Web. The company also is targeting two emerging markets - business trading exchanges and application service providers, online companies that rent software over the Web.

The Oracle 9i database, due in the first half of next year, features new "clustering" technology that will make the company's databases perform faster and more reliably than before.

Clustering allows businesses to harness multiple servers to run a very large database, allowing servers to share work or take over from each other if one fails. "We should be able to tolerate any type of failure," Mr Ellison said.

"It could be hardware, software, a processor...any of those things can break, but users will never see it. Users will always have access to their data." As for ease-of-use, the company has melded many of Oracle's other software products into its database and application server. For example, the company has integrated its data analysis tools, which offer companies the ability to create complex reports by examining business information and seeking patterns and trends, such as online buyers' preferences."

It's our complete Internet deployment platform. We took 75 products and merged them into two," Mr Ellison said. Oracle ranks first in the $11.1 billion database software market. In 1999, Oracle captured 42.4 per cent of sales, followed by IBM with 20.4 per cent and Microsoft with 7.8 per cent, according to research firm IDC. Informix ranks fourth with 5.9 per cent, followed by Sybase with 3.9 per cent. Oracle also competes against IBM, Microsoft, the Sun-Netscape Alliance, BEA Systems and others in the exploding market for application servers and other e-commerce software.

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