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Oracle's SOA positioning gets lost in the weeds
Dwight B. Davis
Oracle's SOA positioning gets lost in the weeds
During the course of its big OpenWorld conference last week, Oracle regularly invoked the topic of service-oriented architecture (SOA). That fact was hardly surprising, given that SOA underlies much of Oracle's efforts to leverage its acquired BEA technologies, is a key foundation for its Application Integration Architecture, and is setting much of the technical agenda for the vendor's next-generation Fusion applications. Sorely missing from OpenWorld, however, was a consistent and overarching message from Oracle about its multi-faceted SOA capabilities and its approach to the SOA 'market'.
Modularity is good in SOA technology, but is not so good in SOA messaging
As with all of the major infrastructure and applications vendors (of which it is both), Oracle has worked for several years to position itself as a provider of SOA-based technologies, products and solutions. Oracle's SOA credentials and capabilities increased significantly this year with its acquisition of BEA Systems. Pre-acquisition, BEA had adopted SOA as the unifying theme under which it was organizing its product portfolio and taking it to market.At its OpenWorld conference, Oracle repeatedly referenced the progress it was making in blending the BEA products into its Fusion Middleware stack, and often did so with an eye toward addressing the demand for SOA-based solutions. But the Oracle-BEA integration wasn't the only SOA-related content at the show. Among that content was:
- claims of offering a 'best-in-class' SOA infrastructure consisting of Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle WebLogic Application Grid, Oracle Business Process Management, and Oracle WebCenter Suite (incorporating many of the core BEA products)
- an expanded SOA Suite, which bundles development tools, BPEL orchestration, enterprise service bus, Web services management, business activity monitoring, business rules and policies, complex event processing, and other elements as an all-in-one SOA starter kit (again, representing elements from both Oracle and BEA)
- an expansion of the pre-built, SOA-based integrations offered as part of Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) initiative, as well as new AIA partnerships such as one with Satyam Computers to jointly build Oracle AIA Process Integration Packs for Logistics Service Providers
- continued SOA investments, specifically in the area of composite web services and elsewhere within its E-Business Suite and other current-generation business applications, and adherence to SOA-based design and development principals in the ongoing work to create Oracle's next-generation Fusion applications.
Oracle should have inherited some of BEA's focus on SOA along with BEA's SOA technology
As should be clear from the items listed above, Oracle has plenty of SOA-related work underway, and can claim parity and even superiority to IBM on many SOA fronts, despite IBM having long held what we consider to be a leadership position in the overall (products and services) SOA market. What Oracle has yet to demonstrate or articulate, however, is a consistent and over-arching SOA message or approach to this market. At present, the company's SOA messaging is fairly random and piecemeal. That is making it harder than necessary for customers interested in pursuing an SOA strategy to figure out exactly how Oracle can help them in that endeavor.It is telling, in this regard, that - unlike IBM - Oracle doesn't have a cross-company team charged with coordinating the SOA-related work or the SOA-related messaging occurring across its business units. This situation is likely to improve somewhat because a single executive, senior vice president Thomas Kurian, is now responsible for both Fusion Middleware and the next-generation Fusion Applications. But Oracle needs a coordinated and consistent approach to managing all of its SOA-related activities - ranging from standards-body participation through to products, partnerships, and sales and marketing - if it wants to counter what has become something of an IBM SOA juggernaut. In explaining to us its reluctance to lead with a comprehensive SOA architecture message, Oracle notes that it overreached in the past by telling customers that it had all the answers to their enterprise software needs. Many customers resisted the 'all-Oracle' message, which drove the company to pursue its current two-pronged strategy: providing an end-to-end Oracle solution while also supporting a 'hot pluggable' standards-based approach that allows customers to mix and match Oracle's products with those of other vendors.Oracle is mistaken, however, if it thinks that customers don't want it to provide them with a broad-based SOA vision and roadmap, and with something more than the provision of the SOA piece parts necessary to attain that vision. Ironically, when Oracle acquired BEA it took on the company's products but abandoned BEA's flagship SOA positioning. Oracle would be wise to reconstitute some aspects of that positioning to get the full benefit out of what has become an impressive SOA product portfolio.
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