Last week at OracleWorld the company announced that it was renaming and re-focusing its WebCenter "Connect" offering to "Oracle Social Network." A new emphasis on social networking services and middleware integration could prove promising, but real business value today comes from effective collaboration efforts that deliver quick business benefits out of the box, with a social kicker downstream. Oracle is a bit late to this party.

More importantly, by my count, this represents the fifth such Oracle announcement in ten years. The company cobbles together and re-brands various enterprise 2.0 offerings, but they never seem to pan out. This must be very frustrating for those of you who actually invested in one of the first four.

Sure, some enterprises will still try it. The tautological we-buy-Oracle-because-it's-Oracle customers still exist -- though they are getting scarcer, at least among our subscribers. If history is any predictor, they could find Oracle's latest offering a bit thin.

You see, Oracle has excellent software development capabilities when it choses to bring them to bear. Yet somehow, in the collaboration and social space, it has tended to favor marketing announcements over the kind of sustained commitment its enterprise customers require. Oracle execs will surely counter that "this time we really mean it." I'll believe it when customers start adopting Oracle Social Networking in droves because it's so good. A prudent enterprise will still let others skin their knees.

I'm not crowing here. Oracle's longterm abdication is mostly just sad -- not because I care about Oracle's success -- but because I believe the marketplace could benefit from a major competitor to SharePoint across all the functionality that Redmond's platform purports to do. If not Oracle, then who?

• Google? Focused too intently on the SMB marketplace
• IBM? Good stuff here and there, but divided and slow overall
• Open source? Promising in some areas but fragmented across technologies and platforms

To be sure, SharePoint has significant shortcomings in terms of social enterprise and collaboration services, there are a wealth of smaller alternatives, and this game is far from over. For Oracle customers, however, the question remains the same: is the company just upselling its WebCenter and database licensees, or delivering business services that can truly stand up to competitors on their own? We'll keep watching...