Countering skepticism that its outsourcing services and database clustering technology aren't catching on quickly, Oracle says demand is accelerating and at its OracleWorld user conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the vendor brought out customers to prove it. Oracle says nearly 1,000 customers have purchased its Real Application Clusters software, including Merrill Lynch, Southwest Airlines, and Travelocity, and that it has 530 customers for its outsourcing services.

"Our core competency isn't maintaining our Oracle database," said William MacLeod, IT VP at Accu-Sort Systems Inc., a manufacturer of automated identification equipment that relies on Oracle to manage the database and Oracle applications running in its data center. Accu-Sort has cut its IT management costs by 20% since it began using Oracle's outsourcing services two years ago.

Oracle also expects the majority of its customers to migrate to the Oracle9i database by mid-2003. Although the product has been available for 16 months, some industry analysts have said customer adoption of the 9i database has been slow.

Oracle is also making several application development-related announcements this week. The vendor is submitting to the Java Community Process a new programming interface specification for creating standards-based application extensions that comply with any Java development environment. Next month, Oracle will also make a grid computing development toolkit available online for free.