There's a lot of confusion towards the positioning of the Oracle Service Bus. In this post I'll try to clear up the issue as best as I can.
First of all, Oracle has already shown a convergence of BEA and Oracle FMW. This will continue even stronger in the upcoming releases, 11g in particular. The strategic platform as it will be introduced with 11g will consist of two main components: Mediator and Oracle Service Bus.
The mediator is an intra-composite mediation component within an application. It is responsible for brokering communications between components that make up a composite (conform Service Component Architecture - SCA). It will enable transformation, routing, event delivery and payload validation. The mediator is almost exclusively based on Oracle ESB (yes, the old Oracle Enterprise Service Bus).
The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) provides service bus capabilities for the entire company, again including standard functionality as transformation, routing, event delivery and payload validation. It's main function is to decouple intra-application communication from inter-application. Endpoint changes will not affect the internals of composite applications. The OSB is based on the Aqualogic Service Bus, augmented with key features from the Oracle ESB, especially JCA adapters, DVM, X-ref and JDev based design-time.
In the long run, I expect the distinction between these implementations to disappear, but I do like the current setup, as it differs between development of application and integration. I wouldn't be surprised to see this pattern appear more.
Monday, 11 May 2009
Monday, 20 April 2009
Oracle Acquires Sun
Today Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun, only 2 weeks after IBM cancelled the acquisition talks with Sun. I'm not sure what this will mean, as Oracle has been moving away from Sun for a long time. This might impact the close relationship Oracle has cultivated with both HP and Dell. It looks like Oracle wants to broaden its horizon into hardware as well, which was already indicated last year with the introduction of the HP Oracle Database Machine.
MySQL, only just acquired last year by Sun, becomes the latest addition to Oracle's database portfolio. Will this mean MySQL will no longer be OSS? Personally I don't think so.
MySQL, only just acquired last year by Sun, becomes the latest addition to Oracle's database portfolio. Will this mean MySQL will no longer be OSS? Personally I don't think so.
Thursday, 9 April 2009
ODTUG SOA/BPM Symposium
Ever hear of the ODTUG Kaleidoscope? It's the yearly conference that's organized by the Oracle Developers Technical User Group (ODTUG). This year there will be a number of symposiums at the day before ODTUG starts.
One of them is the SOA & BPM Symposium, that's organized by Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema and myself. It will not be your average symposium. It will be a very interactive meeting of minds. The symposium is about working together, exchanging experiences and trying to determine the best, most practical way, to go about implementing an SOA.
So, if you feel you have anything useful to bring to the table or you want to hear what recognized specialists in the industry do and think, why not join us at the ODTUG SOA/BPM Symposium?
This symposium is organized by a large number of Oracle ACE Directors. Expect a large number of them to be there and participate actively! Come and join us!
One of them is the SOA & BPM Symposium, that's organized by Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema and myself. It will not be your average symposium. It will be a very interactive meeting of minds. The symposium is about working together, exchanging experiences and trying to determine the best, most practical way, to go about implementing an SOA.
So, if you feel you have anything useful to bring to the table or you want to hear what recognized specialists in the industry do and think, why not join us at the ODTUG SOA/BPM Symposium?
This symposium is organized by a large number of Oracle ACE Directors. Expect a large number of them to be there and participate actively! Come and join us!
Crisis, what crisis?
I'm seeing a lot of companies cutting their IT budgets, in an attempt to reduce costs. I do wonder if that's always the best strategy. Yes, IT budget is usually large, and therefore suspect. However, it is usually a fraction of the total costs of an organization. Just getting rid of external consultants (which is sometimes a good idea, anyway) will save you money in the short run, but what does cutting your IT budget mean for the long term? I think that in the long run, it will cost the organization more.
I read an article in my newspaper (NRC Handelsblad) last Saturday about how companies perform, depending on their investment strategy in times of crisis. Recent research shows that organizations that focus on cutting costs and reducing investments will have a harder time to get out of the crisis. Organizations that keep up investments (though at a lower level, more focused) are able to take advantage of the dwindling crisis (we're not there yet, though) a lot sooner.
As with all business decisions it's imperative to keep the longer term in view. Yes, you will have to look closely at all expenses you have as a company. But, sometimes you can do more with less! Possible ways to cost management can be process optimization, integration and consolidation.
The smart thing to do - again, just my humble opinion - is to keep investments at a certain level, but focus on investing in areas that will give you value for your money. For instance: optimizing your process to deliver more value for your customer (keep your customer happy, even in bad times), decrease the number of unwarranted faults, reduce the human tasks (less people), increase intimacy with your chainpartners, etc. The basic premise for these investments are: the return on investment must be visible within 6-9 months.
If at the same time your focus is on creating a more agile (system and application) infrastructure you are a lot more flexible whenever the marketplace allows new initiatives.
Just cutting the IT budget only means that you will not be able to deliver new functionality as the major part of your budget goes to maintaining the installed base. It will not gain you anything other than (short term) continuity.
I read an article in my newspaper (NRC Handelsblad) last Saturday about how companies perform, depending on their investment strategy in times of crisis. Recent research shows that organizations that focus on cutting costs and reducing investments will have a harder time to get out of the crisis. Organizations that keep up investments (though at a lower level, more focused) are able to take advantage of the dwindling crisis (we're not there yet, though) a lot sooner.
As with all business decisions it's imperative to keep the longer term in view. Yes, you will have to look closely at all expenses you have as a company. But, sometimes you can do more with less! Possible ways to cost management can be process optimization, integration and consolidation.
The smart thing to do - again, just my humble opinion - is to keep investments at a certain level, but focus on investing in areas that will give you value for your money. For instance: optimizing your process to deliver more value for your customer (keep your customer happy, even in bad times), decrease the number of unwarranted faults, reduce the human tasks (less people), increase intimacy with your chainpartners, etc. The basic premise for these investments are: the return on investment must be visible within 6-9 months.
If at the same time your focus is on creating a more agile (system and application) infrastructure you are a lot more flexible whenever the marketplace allows new initiatives.
Just cutting the IT budget only means that you will not be able to deliver new functionality as the major part of your budget goes to maintaining the installed base. It will not gain you anything other than (short term) continuity.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
SOA Marketing is dead! Long live service orientation
Most of you have probably read the blogpost by Anne Thomas Manes about SOA being dead. This coming from an analyst, doesn't surprise me. But I do like the very nice picture she put in.
SOA has been pushed by middleware vendors and analysts alike. But ... they've been pushing SOA as a technology, what it really is NOT. Too bad really, because it makes convincing our businesses a lot harder.
She does have a point in that the term SOA has turned sour. In a way, that's good. It forces us to focus again on what we need to do: we need to build solutions that our business needs. And if we need service orientation to do that, we'll use it.
Look back at all the hypes behind us. They're gone, but the underlying mechanisms (structured programming, object orientation, BPM, decoupling, etc) are still with us and will be for the next years. The same will go for service orientation. So, let's get back to work!
SOA has been pushed by middleware vendors and analysts alike. But ... they've been pushing SOA as a technology, what it really is NOT. Too bad really, because it makes convincing our businesses a lot harder.
She does have a point in that the term SOA has turned sour. In a way, that's good. It forces us to focus again on what we need to do: we need to build solutions that our business needs. And if we need service orientation to do that, we'll use it.
Look back at all the hypes behind us. They're gone, but the underlying mechanisms (structured programming, object orientation, BPM, decoupling, etc) are still with us and will be for the next years. The same will go for service orientation. So, let's get back to work!
Confusing SOA
It seems that a lot of people forget the A in SOA. A is for Architecture. However, SOA has been pushed by vendors and analysts as being the technological panacee for almost all business issues.
There are parts of the architecture where technology comes in, but mainly architecture is about a vision for the company, about business drivers and goals, about aligning the whole company towards the vision, about implementing the right organizational units, processes, procedures and applications.
What this means, is that a lot of people confuse SOA with technology. I hear people ask 'where can i buy SOA' or state 'we're doing SOA, we've just implemented our first webservice'.
The way I see it, there's architecture and there's technology. You can use service orientation concepts in both of them. So:
* SOA = architecture characterized by the use of service orientation concepts
* SOC = service oriented computing (using service orientation techniques)
* SOI = service oriented infrastructure
There are parts of the architecture where technology comes in, but mainly architecture is about a vision for the company, about business drivers and goals, about aligning the whole company towards the vision, about implementing the right organizational units, processes, procedures and applications.
What this means, is that a lot of people confuse SOA with technology. I hear people ask 'where can i buy SOA' or state 'we're doing SOA, we've just implemented our first webservice'.
The way I see it, there's architecture and there's technology. You can use service orientation concepts in both of them. So:
* SOA = architecture characterized by the use of service orientation concepts
* SOC = service oriented computing (using service orientation techniques)
* SOI = service oriented infrastructure
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