You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for neary 10 years, and has as yet modest success.

Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.

The investment Oracle is making in Beehive, announced this week at the massive Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, signals an opportunity born more by the shifting sands beneath Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, than in any new-found performance breakthroughs from Oracle's developers.

Here's why: Economics and technology improvements, particularly around virtualization, are bringing more IT functionality generally back to the servers and off of the client PCs. As a result, the client-server relationship between Microsoft Exchange Server and the Outlook client -- and all those massive and costly (albeit risky) .pst files on each PC -- is being broken.

The new relationship is server to browser, or server to thin-client ICA-fed receiver. Here's what the CIO of Bechtel told a group of analysts recently: ""Spend your (IT) money on the backend, not on the front end."

The cost, security risks, and lack of extension of the data inside of Exchange, and on all those end device hard drives, is a non-sustainable IT millstone. Messaging times, the are a changin.