deltalounge

For those of you who didn’t notice… It is discover beta documentation week in the Oracle blogosphere. All were found somewhere here.

Anyway these give a great preview of Fusion Middleware Performance Guide (Release 11.1.1) and the next version of JDeveloper, including some SOA Suite documentation.

Update May 27th, 2009 Fast paced… the documentation has been removed If any of you have downloaded PDFs please let me know.

Update June 8th, 2009 So far I received a PDF copy of the Fusion Middleware Performance Guide (Release 11.1.1). If you are interested let me know.

Update July 1th, 2009The production documentation for 11g Release 1 is now available.

Sometimes the speed of Oracle releases is hard to keep up with, as Antony Reynolds discovered and shared with us in his blog. Even when product combinations are certified with each other.

Oracle 11g database

The 11g release 1 of the database has been out long enough. It cannot be considered bleeding edge nowadays. So both from a features and longevity perspective it makes sense to deploy SOA Suite on a 11g R1 database. This blog post will show you the additional steps that are needed to install SOA Suite 10.1.3. on 11g R1.

Oracle Enterprise Linux

The SOA Suite installer checks whether the OS it is running on, is supported. At the time 10.1.3 was first released, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (OEL) wasn´t on the list. The result is that the installer fails. There is a patch (6339508) available and a blog post that describes the solution.

Gartner states that the growth in revenue (2008 compared to 2007) in the application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software market is lower than the growth in 2007 compared to 2006. Please notice that, while in a recession, there is still growth, only single digit in stead of double digit. Fabrizio Biscotti gives two reasons for the loss of growth:

1. The slowdown of the economy;
2. The effects of the acquisition of BEA Systems.

Asheesh Raina elaborates on the latter: Oracle’s acquisition of BEA had a profound effect, especially in markets (like Asia-Pacific) were BEA historically was controlling a huge portion of the regional market. The process of combining BEA and Oracle, and the relative uncertainty surrounding the outcome, has driven potential or undecided customers to delay their purchases. Obviously it is typical that an acquisition of such magnitude has led to the typical uncertainty that always follows major merger & acquisition activities.

If the merger of Oracle and BEA has this impact on the market, what will the effect of the announced acquisition of Sun bring… Especially, if we are taking into account that not all uncertainty of the previous merger has been cleared. Yes, there is a strategic direction, and we think it is great. However, it has to be implemented in releases that we thought should be released by now. Oracle has history of keeping it´s cards to it´s chest with release dates and content of the releases. In this case, this unclear operational path adds to the uncertainty. Resulting in more undecided customers in the market.

It can be stated that the acquisition of Sun is smaller, and therefore will result in less impact. However in the case of Sun, there is less clarity on what exactly the benefits will be in the application infrastructure and middleware software market. Overall there remain lot of questions on synergy, and the future of products & technology unanswered. The time frame that is needed to answer the major part of these, will have influence on the total revenue in this software market, and the way Oracle’s market share is going.

Last week the Open Group released the SOA Book. It is described as “a collection of source material for use by enterprise architects working with Service-Oriented Architecture“. No surprise that it is (partially) based on TOGAF.

I like the overview in the features and benefits pages. The benefits are described on a less abstract level than the strategic goals of SOA described by Erl. At the same time Erl keeps more consequent in touch with the goals, for example when describing SOA Patterns. Besides that some of the features in the SOA Book are neither specific nor required for SOA implementation (Asset Wrapping, Model-Driven Implementation). That doesn’t help to get a clear definition and grasp on what SOA is.

No doubt that management of change, also known as governance, gets some attention in the book. The presented SOA Governance Vitality Method (SGVM) is a specification of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. It could be of help as a checklist when managing a SOA project.

Although it wasn’t the first subject most people thought of, after the announcement that Oracle wants to acquire Sun Microsystems, both have a well equipped stack of products for integration, and to create the software infrastructure for a SOA. This post will go into that part of the acquisition in more detail. Based on web resources and analyst reports, we are looking for synergy and additions to the product portfolio.

Sun

Sun’s platform for integration is Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). For the larger part this came with the acquisition of SeeBeyond. Before that ICAN, as it was called, was SeeBeyond’s flagship product. It’s roots are in the EAI market. CAPS in turn is a sub package of JES.

Gartner sees Sun, with the Java CAPS products, as a visionair (other link). Primarily because of a lag of mind share of the CAPS compared to other suites in the market, and because of less focus on this open-source component compared to others, including Solaris, MySQL, and GlassFish. Sun is recognized for it’s open-source leadership, broad comprehensive set of enterprise application infrastructure technologies, and leadership in the Java Community Process.

In the most recent Forrester Wave for Integration Centric BPMS, Java CAPS is seen as a “competitive solution”. This is mainly due to lower scores in the areas of B2B, BPM, and the incomplete overall product strategy.

Oracle

With the SOA Suite, Oracle has a great (software) platform for enterprise scale integration and service-oriented architecture. Which is in the process of being enriched with the BEA product at the time of writing.

Forrester regards Oracle as a repeat in the Leader category based on the comprehensive capabilities of its SOA Suite product. Trough the acquisition of BEA, Oracle inherited some key products such as the enterprise service bus and repository.

Besides the praise for the SOA Suite Gartner stresses the downside of this acquisition: The massive effort that will be needed to integrate BEA Systems’ technologies into Oracle’s original products. This will absorb a significant part of Oracle’s R&D resources. In addition there is not yet a clear migration path for existing customers.

Perspective

With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle gains the customers base of CAPS. Because of Oracle’s reputation in the market, it remains to be seen whether the leadership in both the open-source and Java EE community can be capitalized. But still, when Oracle owns Sun, Oracle will “own” Java EE, the platform of many, if not most, enterprise SOA deployments…

The downside of the acquisition, that R&D focus will be on integration instead of on development of new features and releases, will gain weight. Here consolidation will be in the way of innovation. Combined with the unclear migration path, this will affect customers in the process of choosing a suite of products to support them in their integration effort, or the software infrastructure to support a SOA implementation.