6/5/2002 -- Six months after unveiling a new, three-tiered DBA certification program, Oracle is making more changes to its certification and education offerings.

Chris Pirie, vice president of Oracle University, told CertCities.com in an interview last week that the company will debut at least two new certifications tracks during the next few months.

Pirie declined to say what those certifications would be, but he did say that the company's Java Developer title will be refocused on Web services and will no longer require candidates to pass the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam (one reason, he said, that Oracle pulled out of the JCert initiative in April).

Pirie also said that the company will soon be renaming its Web-based online learning offering, the Oracle Learning Network (OLN), to Oracle Continuing Education. Oracle will keep the service's new, lower price point of $349 per year, at least for now (the service originally debuted at more than $1,000 per year).

And the company is currently aligning its hundreds of online and classroom training offerings into 10 job-roles tracks -- many of which will lead directly to a certification.

"Our certification program is really becoming more and more important as a way for us to go to market," he said. "Our charter [as Oracle University] is to get recognized skills in the marketplace, and the certification field levels the playing field - it provides the consistent end point to all our training options."

"We're investing heavily in our certification programs," Pirie continued. "We have spent the last three months re-engineering our whole product section to support [our] certification method."

According to Pirie the Oracle Certified Professional program continues to grow -- 113,000 at last count. Pirie said the growth rate is steady at 20 percent in North America and Europe, and up as much as 300 percent in China other Asian countries.

Oracle University is the education arm of Oracle, training 670,000 students per year through traditional classroom and online learning. Pirie said that the group contributes $600 million to Oracle's bottom line annually, and is chartered to operate at a 50 percent profit margin.

For more information on Oracle University, click here. For details on Oracle's certification program as it currently stands, click here.

CertCities.com will bring you more on the new certification titles as the information becomes available. - B.N.