Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Launch

Finally the date is known. July 1st will bring us Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, immediately followed by a huge training program.

What will be delivered:

Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g: the long awaited Portal solution

Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g: BEA Weblogic Server the new middleware foundation

Oracle Identity Management 11g: Next level of security and compliance

Oracle SOA Suite 11g: a new, very tightly integrated environment to build service oriented applications.

What's missing? Oracle BPA Suite 11g, which will probably appear within 1 month.

The delayed delivery (we expected 11g to be released about a year ago) is mainly due to effort that went into the integration of BEA. Too bad that we had to wait, but in the end it is delivering us a whole lot more value. It was worth it! Enjoy 11g!

My Take on Governance: People, Process and Tools

I was reading Dave Berry's blog on how to achieve the ROI on SOA by implementing Oracle SOA Governance tooling. Dave starts with a simple example of how customers - using Oracle BPEL PM - have no clue as on how to achieve reuse. In his blog he states that 'one of the main values of SOA Governance is to deliver savings by enabling this reuse of existing services'. From there on he moves towards governance tooling, enabling visibility, control and monitoring of all SOA artifacts.

My first response was to point out that tooling for reuse is nice, but there's also something about culture. What about the 'not invented here' syndrome? After that, i started thinking (well done, Dave, you got me thinking!) about the elements of SOA Governance. To me governance is about people, process and tools. People, because it's all about the professionals on the job and the need to govern their actions to make sure the right things happen at the right time. To do that, you need a governance process in place that ensures that all artifacts are reviewed and judged to be either confirming to the architecture, or rightly not so. But, that should be done, before anything get's built! Finally it will really enable to process and the people to have good governance tooling available. For to be sure: we do need visibility, control and monitoring to enable reuse. And we do need reuse to reap the major profits of SOA.

For instance, I know of a customer case where the people involved were SOA adepts. However, they decided not to use an existing service, even though it was accepted by the Architecture Board. The main reasons being, that the service was developed by a different department, it's quality and availability could (maybe) not be guaranteed and they could probably do a better job. Unfortunately, this happened not just once, but four times for the same artifact. The company ended up having 4 almost equal services doing almost the same thing. Being able to govern this process would have saved them 3 times building the same component! Tooling in itself would probably have made this problem more visible, but would not have prevented it.

So what are the typical governance processes you see being advocated either internally or by vendors? Let me know!

Oracle Service Bus Explained

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.

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.

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!

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.