deltalounge

Few days ago Gartner published it’s Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis tools. ARIS is one of the most comprehensive enterprise and BP architecture toolsets on the market, with strong support for a wide variety of standards, methods and frameworks.

IDS Scheer OEMed ARIS to both SAP and Oracle. Oracle and SAP use ARIS as the EA and BPA modeling tool. This will probably be continued even now that Software AG has acquired IDS Scheer. This acquisition can introduce a period of organization and product integration. Gartner suggests that customers monitor the situation.

ARIS Express

Earlier IDS Scheer has released ARIS Express, as free BPM software product to the market. Gartner sees the Express product as a lightweight BPA product for low maturity or occasional use. It can be used for commercial use and has an upgrade path to ARIS professional products. A great product for anyone starting on the BPM track.

Gartner has taken a look into the recently released Fusion Middleware 11g R1. They see Oracle refining and reasserting its middleware strategy with this release. The nuance has also been brought in this blog before:

The stated objective for OFM 11g is to be “complete, integrated, hot-pluggable, best-of-breed,” all of which are achieved in OFM 11g to a degree, although each will require additional investment from Oracle over time.

To customers it is important to notice that OFM 11g is the foundation for Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA), Oracle’s next generation of packaged business applications. This leverages the need to create an excellent product for Oracle, because it has to eat it’s own dog food here. One can expect that Oracle will continue investing in this set of products.
The only uncertainty is to what extent the acquisition of Sun Microsystems will impact the large range of products in OFM. This introduces some challenges, resulting in changes in some of the OFM products (no severe cases expected here).

iPod for the enterprise

Oracle refers to a strategy like the recently introduced “database machine” as the iPod for the enterprise. First product in this range is a highly optimized database appliance, with pre-installed, pre-configured RDBMS in a hardware arrangement, including processing and storage capabilities.
This is a new direction for Oracle. With the Sun acquisition Oracle is no longer dependent on partners for the technology, knowledge, skills and hardware. It is expected that a middleware appliance will be available within a year. Here the Sun statement “software is free” could be turned to “hardware is free”. Oracle afterall stays a software company and could provide hardware for their customers convenience.

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.