SOA filling the Gaps

There is an old saying: Respect and Suspect. When someone declares, writes or says something, do not decry or ignore him – respect him.  It may turn out that the information he provides is valuable or useful. On the other hand, Suspect and check whether what was manifested is true, half true or false. This attitude is the corn stone of Scientific Research. I am not a Scientist, but during few decades in IT , I found Respect and Suspect as very useful approach as well as in my hobby playing Bridge (respect and suspect your opponents bids and play). The old saying came to my mind, while reading good news: Oracle Fusion Applications was released for use by Early Adopters after five years of development. The article was published by Mark Fontecchio in PeopleSoft Planet site. The following bullets summarize the article: 1. Oracle Fusion Applications is ready but are the customers ready for using it? 2.   Potential users  Those wh...

I was asked in ebizq SOA forum: What Do You Think of Oracle Buying AmberPoint? My answer in the following lines is my First Take of that acquisition. AmberPoint is a very small vendor who has a remarkable Run Time SOA Governance product. Its offerings includes also SOA Management solutions and lately also Transactions Run Time Governance products. It was a matter of time until one of the mega companies will acquire it. The natural candidate for acquiring it was its closest partner Microsoft . I think that Oracle acquired it in order to fill a gap in its SOA portfolio ( BEA licensed AmberPoint's products prior to being acquired by Oracle), but the main reason for that acquisition is beyond SOA. Executing Oracle strategy requires Network and Systems Management (NSM) solutions even before the Sun acquisition. After the Sun acquisition an NSM solution is a must. Oracle's sales men are talking about management solutions at least four or five years, but unfortunatel...

On June, 17 th I participated in an interesting oracle event: Oracle Day. The event took place near Tel-Aviv airport and its theme was: Building the Future. Oracle's president Mrs. Safra Catz presented the company's vision. . Two other senior Oracle managers presented Oracle G11 database and the company's CRM Software Strategy, (presented by a Senior Vice President who was a Siebel employee prior to its acquisition by Oracle). Afterwards concurrent tracks on various technological and applicative topics took place. I participated in the Fusion Middleware track. Oracle's Vision Mrs. Safra Catz used an analogy of buying a car vs. buying car parts and building it. As most of car consumers will not be able to build the cars the roads will be almost empty. Oracle's view is that building and integrating IT systems is similar to building a car by a consumer. It takes a lot of time and resources. The weakest link is integration. The Oracle alternative i...

A Keynote presentation titled O racle Fusion Middleware and BEA: an inside Look – Product Strategy , may clarify some of Oracle 's SOA directions discussed in a post immediately after the acquisition and a follow up post. It is a presentation on SOA products strategy as well as to other related products strategy. The approach is to define mix of BEA and Oracle products as strategic components composing Oracle's SOA platform. The leading brand name is Oracle Fusion., however in some areas Oracle offerings include two competing products: Oracle's and BEA's. In other cases one of product is a preferred solution. The most relevant slide is presented above. This slide presents a SOA suit. In my opinion, although quantitatively more Oracle components are included, the most significant elements are BEA's products. The ESB is BEA's Aqua Logic and Complex Events handling is based upon BEA's product. It should be noted that not all SOA infr...

--> I n a previous post in January I analyzed the SOA perspective of Oracle 's BEA acquisition. I predicted that Oracle's future SOA solutions will be dominated by BEA's SOA solutions. Some comments presented different predictions from mine. According to The Register article published on June 5 th Oracle is splitting the BEA AquaLogic products line between Web 2.0 (originated from the Plumtree acquisition) and BPM (based on the Fuego acquisition). The Register also has learned from individuals close to the company that BEA's new owner Oracle is merging the AquaLogic and WebLogic professional service teams. The AquaLogic Web 2.0 products probably will be overtook by Stellent Content Management which was acquired by Oracle on November 2006. As described in previous post titled SOA & BPM , SOA and BPM are strongly related. Another post tiled SOA and BPM: Too much Round Tripping? described an innovative product trying to extend this affinit...

The bigest Software Vendors are continuosly bying other companies. The most recent acquisitions are BEA 's acquisition by Oracle and the anouncement that Sun Microsystems is going to aquire MySQL . As SOA is the main topic of this blog, I will focus on the first acquisition, which is related to SOA. MySQL acquisition process by Sun is not directly related to SOA. BEA is a long time target for acquisition: a technology leader with significant market share which is also significantly smaller than its competitors like IBM , Microsoft or Oracle. On January 18th 2004 I published an article in Hebrew titled: Why BEA will not be aquired by Microsoft? This article was a response to a Research Note by Yankee Group 's analyst Dana Gardner, which correctly described the acquisitions trend. However, I disagreed with the scenario of Microsoft bying BEA. My argument was that I am not sure if any of the bigger companies will aquire BEA, but if any company will aquire BEA, it will be Oracle a...