Thursday, December 28, 2006

Unbreakable Linux Expectations

Unbreakable Linux Proves Unpopular as Red Hat Shares Rebound
Unbreakable Linux was downloaded 9,000 times in the first 30 days, according to comments made by Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle’s president Chuck Phillips during the company’s recent earnings call. Compare this with the download rates for Red Hat Inc and Novell Inc, however, and it is almost insignificant.

While it may seem Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program is not gaining the traction it should, I highly doubt that Larry expected to convert the masses. The program is more a signal of a continuous shift for Oracle to cover the entire IT stack. Meanwhile, Oracle makes a few bucks on services without a significant investment. Moreover, it's really a defensive move against operating system providers. Oracle wants to neutralize Microsoft’s dominance in the OS layer, prevent open source competitors like Red Hat from inching up the stack, and cover an area that IBM and SAP does not own. So I don't think Oracle is spending any sleepless nights worrying about the progress of its Linux program and comparing it against Red Hat or Novell.

SAP Does Enterprise Search Widget-Style

InfoWeek did a short piece on SAP's Enterprise Search product and how it will offer flexible searches for back-end data. It's all a part of the Information Worker concept SAP introduced with the Duet partnership with Microsoft. I think it's about time we had something like this. Letting business users access back-end data through widgets and other easy-to-use tools is the way to empower the information worker. It's all about making information access simpler.

But that's not all SAP has in store for 2007. Enterprise Search, which the company will also introduce in the first half of the year, looks to me to be one of the more interesting products of 2007. As you know, most search products focus on text. If you're looking for news, reviews, or an esoteric piece of information about an obscure author, Google is the way to go. But what if you want to know the status of a customer shipment, how much inventory is left, who is so-and-so's supervisor, or whether I am authorized to give him or her a raise? These are the kinds of questions Enterprise Search is built to answer.

SAP is also seeding the development community with a toolkit to build what you might call it applets, widgets, or gadgets, ala Microsoft Vista, for SAP. The company is also building its own gadgets that give you an alert box for, say, an RSS reader that tracks business events rather than news or blogs. That way, a sales manager can monitor when a sales rep closes a deal, for example. There are also alerts for corporate KPIs (key performance indicators), as well as alerts for tracking workflow queues, such as notifying a purchasing manager of requisitions waiting for approval.

Sounds like a dashboard, but these applets embody more of a Web 2.0 approach — they’re updated over the Internet, you don’t have to install anything, they’re more dynamic than what you get with a dashboard, and you get to pick the ones you want.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Fusion Downgrade

BusinessWeek did a story on Oracle's earnings next week and how Oracle's integration project progress (or lack thereof) is the reason for its downgrade.

First Albany Capital analyst Mark Murphy on Friday downgraded software developer Oracle Corp. to "Neutral" from "Buy," saying the stock is pricey, growth is likely to slow and the company may have trouble integrating its many acquisitions.

"Investors are too complacent if they believe that the largest, messiest, most complex application integration project in the history of the technology industry will go off without a hitch," Murphy wrote in a research report.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Oracle Loses Key Retail Bid

InformationWeek did a story on the lack of integration of Oracle's retail solution set and how that led to a lost bid to SAP. Despite all of Oracle's commotion in retail, I think marketing is one thing but customer choice speaks volumes.

Oracle Loses Would-Be Customer To SAP Due To Integration Concerns

  • One of the biggest turnoffs to Oracle, says Sport Chalet CFO Howard Kaminsky, was -- ouch -- lack of integration between Oracle financial applications and the retail apps of Retek, which it acquired about 18 months ago.
  • SAP's offering for the retail market, by comparison, "was ahead of its time in that a lot of pieces were integrated," Kaminsky says.
  • Such impressions on would-be customers aren't good for Oracle, as the potential difficulty of integrating its myriad acquisitions is the biggest question hanging over its success in ERP.
  • "We went out and looked at all the usual software companies that relate to retail," Kaminsky says. "At the time we didn't expect SAP to be in the running; we didn't know they were that interested in the middle market. They came back very aggressively and said they were very interested."

Sunday, November 05, 2006

A Would-Be Contender in Utilities: Oracle Buys SPL WorldGroup

Oracle announced its acquisition of utility vendor, SPL WorldGroup on November 3, 2006. As part of Oracle’s vertical market strategy, SPL adds a portfolio of best-of-breed revenue & operations management solutions for the utilities sector. SPL employees will be retained and join a newly created industry business unit for utilities, led by Larry Hagewood, former President and CEO of SPL, as General Manager.

Why purchase SPL? Oracle's rationale was the following:
  1. Penetrate an industry where SAP is the clear leader. With SAP in a strong #1 position (over 800 utility customers & 300 CIS customers), Oracle saw an opportunity to buy a foothold in a market where it lacked presence.
  2. Existing Oracle utility products were weak or functionality was missing

>Oracle had weak and overlapping Enterprise Asset Management products; it still has a long way to go in rationalizing disparate applications – Oracle eAM, JD Edwards, and the SPL-acquired Synergen product

>Oracle completely lacked Customer Care & Billing, Outage & Distribution Management, Meter Data Management, and Mobile Workforce Management capabilities

Oracle speaks of the integration work done between Siebel and SPL. However, the integration between Siebel and SPL is not as strong as Oracle purports it to be. Business processes are not integrated--examples include not being to move between applications to complete a business scenario.

There's plenty of marketing hype surrounding this acquisition. Sure, if Oracle succeeds in integrating all of the pieces SPL has itself purchased (CES, Axiom, Sidewinder, Synergen) and ties these products to Siebel, JDE, PSFT, and Oracle...then yes, we might have something. But Oracle has a bigger challenge in Fusion. The question is, will it really dedicate resources to utilities when it has much much bigger development issues at hand? I do commend Oracle for spinning out a separate utilities division. Whether it thrives or fails in the Oracle machine is to be determined.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Little Known MDM Successes

The success of a product is ultimately proved out by customer adoption. For some reason, MDM is an area where poor market perception has severly limited its progress. Shifting strategies by Oracle, IBM, and SAP have stunted this emerging market. It's caused concern over whether MDM is a viable opportunity, whether any vendors have a complete solution, and whether customers really want it. Well, I can tell you, customers definitely want it. Webinars on the MDM topic is consistently sold out. The pipleline for MDM is jam-packed, across several industries. Yet, it is that bias against MDM as the red-haired stepchild after several initial stumblings in product direction (mistakes committed by SAP and Oracle alike) that continues to stunt MDM growth.

Like I said, ultimately it depends on the customers. Today, SAP has more than forty customers live and more than thirty references. If that doesn't say "good product" with a solid future, I don't know what does. Only IBM may have more customers through acquisitions and service engagements.

A Note on the "Bloatosphere"

Tom Smith from InformationWeek makes a great point about the proliferation and longevity of blogs:

The number of blogs has increased 100-fold since 2003 to 50 million. In addition, the total has doubled every six months for about two years, according to a new report quantifying the blogosphere by Technorati. In July alone, there were 1.6 million blog postings daily, or 18.6 per second. Two blogs were created each second of each day.

While the report and its author say the rate of blogging activity and growth can't continue, the data begs many questions about the direction of blogging: Are quality blogs simply getting lost in the noise? Or more precisely, is quality even relevant in the blogging world? How do you find blogs worthy of consistent return visits when the universe of blogs has reached into the tens of millions? If you do have a quality blog, is it even possible to build a sustainable audience and consistently deliver valuable (or entertaining or insightful) information to readers?

I do think that we're getting to a point where there IS a lot of noise. But if you are an informed reader, you can easily make the distinction between a quality blog and someone who is just spewing. Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it and finding a voice in a sea of very opinionated industry insiders is challenging. I do agree that over time, they will consolidate, like any other market. However, I am constantly amazed at the breadth and depth of blogs and continue to discover blogs of note in every walk of life -- from ones dedicated to niche software markets to ones on fashionable purses. I mean, the key is community, right? As long as you can build and sustain a community interested in a certain topic, consistently providing updated and interesting information, then you are hardpressed to find another one just like it.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Difference Between SAP MDM and Oracle Data Hubs

SAP’s MDM approach is to primarily synchronize and harmonize data, letting BPP or SAP solution modules retain their individual master data persistence. This is different from Oracle’s DH approach, which dictates DHs as the only master data storage. It does not allow EBS modules to retain master data persistence. In this way, Oracle had ambitions to control all master data in an organization, regardless of what systems they had, SAP or otherwise. This centralized hub and spoke model however, is highly inflexible and has its weaknesses. Oracle realized this and recently changed its product plans to shift all DH technology to the Siebel platform. This move improves upon Oracle’s DH offering because Siebel lends a federated or distributed master data management approach, where any installation can be a master and any installation can be a slave. This approach is more similar to SAP’s as it allows flexibility in adapting data management to whatever business process flow the customer wants.

If the customer wants its CRM system to be the single source of creation for customer master and the one that retains all customer records, then that is easily enabled. The rules for data mapping, data distribution, and data validation for source and destination systems are easily defined as processes for managing data. The customer would not have to continually ping the hub for master data any time updates or changes need to be made. While these are Oracle’s future DH plans, currently the DH product is still based on old Oracle technology. Oracle will likely maintain the old DH product as it develops the new Siebel-based product.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Scarlet Letter "E"

This is hilarious. Same could be said for Motorola's Razr and its new lineup, the KRZR, the RIZR, and the SLVR.

Q U O T E D

Your absence has really thrown a spanner into the trademark and IP strategy of a lot of Web 2.0 firms. Where do you think you're missed the most?

"There definitely are companies that may be showing signs of having issues. In addition to Flickr, there are companies like Beggr, Coastr, Colrpickr, Fastr, Frappr, Gabbr, Mappr, Nabbr, Phrasr, Soonr, Talkr, Zooomr and probably a metric ton of other ones. A few individuals have flamed me for 'stifling innovation,' but I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to help those organizations out of a creative rut. Unfortunately, few seem to have risen to the challenge."

-- In an exclusive interview with BidnessWeek, the letter "e" talks about what he's been doing for the past few years

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Prison Outsourcing

Prison outsourcing was heralded as the next India for BPO (close to home, no "cultural" barriers, and high productivity). How crazy is this suggestion? It's one thing to have prisoners do manual labor but can you imagine ordering a pair of J.Crew khakis through Sing Sing? I can think of so so many security breaches. In India, we're talking about highly trained professionals, many with masters and PhD's answering phones. I would fathom we won't find the same level of education amongst our prison population. Oh, well...it's nice to entertain the idea, albeit a bit scary.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

SAP Buys Praxis

SAP AG acquired Praxis, n CRM e-commerce company to target the SMB market. This move is not so different from Oracle's continued acquisition binge, except that SAP is much more careful about which vendors to pick up. There's no reason that SAP shouldn't have an appetite for acquisitions despite its commitment to organic growth. While Praxis doesn't give SAP anything for its on-demand solution, it does lend important functionality that SAP needs for its on-premise offering which SAP can eventually offer as hosted somewhere down the line.

The bottom line on this acqusition is that it is a smart one if SAP is serious about SMB...and it is. Business One needed better CRM functionality and now it has it. Certainly, integration with Praxis will be far easier than the hairy monster Oracle is dealing with right now. Small aquisitions, small wins, for small businesses.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Quote of the Day - 7.11.06

"People think that we started Firefox just to take down Microsoft, just to win some kind of competition. Why would we want to win? There's no money involved for us. There's no (initial public offering) for this company; it's a non-profit. Why would we want to do this unless there's a real need? The truth is I think Microsoft is very directly responsible for spyware and adware and the pop-up ads in general that proliferated across the Web after they abandoned their product. I mean, this is the world's most-used software application ever ... and I just think it's irresponsible for a company to abandon it simply because they can't find a financial incentive to continue development on it."

-- Blake Ross, one of the founders of the Mozilla Firefox project

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Oracle's 585 B.S.

Oracle recently released a ridiculous press release that said “585 Customers Selected Oracle Over SAP in Fiscal Year 2006.” In it, 12 customer names were named as examples of wins over SAP. Oracle also named yet another 15 wins against SAP in its Q4 2006 earnings announcement.

This is pure marketing b.s.! Having gone through this list of customers, only a handful were actually competitive deals. The rest, it seems, Oracle dreamt up or counted as wins on their own whim. The majority of claims were upgrades for Oracle or extensions of apps for vendors it recently acquired. Just a whole lot of smoke and mirrors...typical Oracle fare.

If Oracle spent half as much time on integrating its apps and finishing up Fusion as it did picking on SAP, it would have a killer product set. But no, it continues to pick petty battles and create false campaigns around its successes instead of focusing on customers. Face it, Oracle is just a big bully with a lot of hot air.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Quote of the Day - 7.4.06

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."

— Thomas Jefferson


Happy Fourth of July!!!

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Demantra - Just An "OK" Purchase for Oracle

Oracle bought Demantra last week, which seemed odd at first. Then realizing just how bad Oracle's APS solution was shed light on why Demantra is a good buy. Certainly, this is a technology purchase and an industry play - Demantra does not boast of many customers. During my analyst days, I recall Demantra not making much headway in terms of customer traction or real innovation. Of course, if you ask the analysts out there today whether this was a good purchase, no one's going to say it's not, for fear of an Oracle backlash. But whether this really puts Oracle ahead or even on par with the likes of SAP and the one or two other SCM best-of-breeds left out there, I would say...probably not. Where Oracle can gain an advantage, I believe is tying Demantra together with ProfitLogic and of course Retek. But until those pieces are integrated, they are just that...random pieces of technology.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Interesting Database Innovation

IBM Database pioneer, Don Haderle innovates on database technology with Ants Software.

Since most database management software products are proprietary and incompatible, its costly and risky for companies to migrate from one to another. In comes Ants, which claims to be "universally compatible." This means it can mimic all database management software, enabling companies that tailored applications to run on Oracle or DB2 to easily run them on other databases.

But will Oracle or IBM just buy them up? What's the competitive differentiation here? According to Haderle:

"If Ants viewed itself as a DB2 killer, they'd die along with all the other object database companies," Haderle says. "Even if we could operate three times faster, those differences only last for a moment in time. IBM would throw the hordes on it and have it figured out and build it, or buy it. "The question in my mind is how to find growth in areas not supported by existing database systems and be synergistic with the big guys," Haderle adds.

SAP & Microsoft Reintroduce Mendocino as "Duet"

SAP and Microsoft introduce Duet software, bringing together the worlds of productivity and enterprise applications.

The Microsoft spokesperson in the press release explains what the product is:

“Duet is a business mashup of Microsoft Office applications with SAP enterprise information and processes that can improve the quality and speed of decision making and workforce productivity. With Duet, SAP will be easier to access and more relevant for many more users who spend their workdays in the ‘Microsoft’ Office.”

This is a prime opportunity for SAP to extend its reach beyond R/3 users and the targeted segment of people that touch ERP systems. Everything happens in Excel and Outlook anyway. What's in it for Microsoft? It gets to maintain itself in the frontline, owning the business user...AND it gets to build on integration with enterprise applications which it can then leverage for its own apps products later.

Friday, April 28, 2006

Oracle Acquires Net4call

Deal adds a building block to Oracle's service delivery platform (SDP) portfolio and strategy.

"Oracle has acquired Norway's Net4call for an unspecified sum. The deal doesn't the fit the recent pattern of Oracle acquisitions, which have largely involved vertical-specific applications providers. Net4call is more on the IT infrastructure side, with its main competence coming in an application development product for the Parlay environment."

I would disagree with Line56's assessment. This certainly has a vertical play - telecom. Seems like Oracle is trying bolstering its telecom service provisioning capabilities through this acquisition.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Quote of the Day - 4.27.06

"There was a mango lassi machine. As if everyone is entitled to a mango lassi. What kind of world is this? Mango lassi is special, exotic, meant for only those who deserve such a treat. Unless you are at Google, where it's mango lassi madness."
-- A recent visitor marvels at the exotic wonders of Google's Mountain View campus.

...At SAP, we get Coke AND Pepsi! Whoo-hoo!

Manugistics Acquired By JDA - Supply Chain Blunder or Firesale Win?

JDA Software, a specialist in retail-facing e-business applications, is acquiring Manugistics for $211 million.

Supply chain vendor, Manugistics, had been floundering for the last few years and it's not a surprise that it was finally acquired. Having seen success during the dot.com boom as one of the top best-of-breed supply chain players, Manugistics joined the likes of i2 when the SCM market matured and demand for manufacturing software was tapped out. As SAP and other behemoths entered the market with a best-of-suite option (as well as bundled APO with SAP ERP purchases), SCM specialty vendors found it increasingly difficult to compete.

Manugistics then attempted to expand its value proposition to encompass demand chain management, offering profit and revenue optimization solutions to retailers, CPG, high-tech, and hospitality and travel companies. The company was unable to establish a new market for itself in PRO, despite the promising ROI it offered customers.

At some point, Manugistics was going to be an acquisition target but who would buy them given the maturity of the SCM market? What is surprising is that JDA stepped in. While it makes sense that retail, wholesale distribution, and CPG manufacturing is covered by the combination of JDA and Manugistics -- targeting a demand chain strategy, it is unlikely that JDA will succeed in entering manufacturing. This definitely opens the door for SAP. The crux of Manugistics' installed base is CPG manufacturers that have a SAP R/3 and Manugistics SCM landscape. Converting these customers to all SAP is a likely scenario.

What does JDA get then? Well, besides SCM - which I think is a non-starter, JDA gets Manugistics' transportation management (TMS) solution - which is known to be the best software in its category. This could benefit JDA's retail customer base. Also, Manugistics' PRO capabilities could help JDA with retail price optimization - an area that SAP now owns with its Khimetrics acquisition and Oracle owns with its ProfitLogic plus Retek combination.

However, all in all, what JDA gets is a SCM company that has already seen its best days and despite getting the company on the cheap, JDA has likely made a supply chain blunder.

Friday, March 31, 2006

Oracle is a Contender

We were recently named one of America's Most Admired Companies 2006 by Fortune Magazine. SAP is #3 and Oracle is #7. I'm surprised Google's not in there.

The Epitomy of Geekdom (I Mean, Go SAP!)

This video eptiomizes just how geeky my world is. As "exciting" and "sexy" as software can be, videos like this snaps me into cruel reality.

Darth Ellison vs ABAP

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Quotes of the Day - 3.29.06

Q: Do you have an iPod?
A: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

-- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the Ballmer family prefers to dine on its own dogfood.

"For all those who lament the pre-inclusion of Internet Explorer, it's worth noting that if IE WASN'T pre-installed, most people wouldn't be able to download all that IM, media playing, or even alternative browsers such as Firefox. In other words, if IE wasn't pre-included with Windows, the market for software -- including open source software targeted at desktop computers -- might actually shrink."

-- Microsoft's John Carroll says Firefox users, the open source community, all of us owe Redmond an enormous debt of gratitude.

-Silicon Valley

Google's "Oops "

Google accidentally deleted its official Google blog Monday afternoon leaving its Blogspot URL vacant, apparently leaving it to be picked up by some random person. After an hour or so, the blog was reclaimed along with a Google apology:

"We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad."

That's pretty bad (and humiliating) that Google can't get it together -- what hope is there for other corporate blogs?

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Oracle Admits Data Hubs Not Good Enough?

There have been many rumors lately that Oracle plans to drop its Customer Data Hub (CDH)product and move over to using its acquired Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM) instead. If Oracle does make this move, then it is basically admitting that Data Hubs aren't good enough and going with Siebel is a better option.

This will have interesting implications since Oracle has been pushing a single data schema approach, one that encompasses their EBS data model. What will it mean if Oracle drops CDH? It means that they will have to eventually offer the Siebel data model in CDH also. Offering all of these data models pre-packaged will take lots of time because Oracle probably wants to include PeopleSoft and JDE's data models as well. All of these rewrites and integration work admist plans for Fusion is pretty tough. But it makes sense for Oracle to prioritize Siebel UCM integration if it is dropping all other CRM applications in its portfolio in favor of the Siebel CRM solution. The problem is, Oracle gets into this conundrum of continuously re-writing Data Hubs and picking and choosing data models to give to customers.

The reality is that 95% of customers end up re-working and re-shaping their data models anyway and need data objects they hadn't thought of. Customers require the proper tools to create a data model customized for their specific business process. What customers want is data model flexibility, not data model rigidity. I mean, isn't the SOA movement--which Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft can all agree will happen--all about business process flexibility? Dictating a data model to customers is not the best way to offer flexibility.

What should customers' approach be then? They need a true MDM SOA "service" -- one that allows you to create your own data model. That's truly applying the SOA principle.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Open Source Does Matter - But In What Segments?

Does Open Source Matter? To IT, It Does, Says Nicholas Carr

"The exact shape of things to come is still hard to discern, but Carr predicted a commodity base of open-source software was likely to become available through large centralized suppliers.

Carr said the enterprise software stack of the future would have a mix of open source and commercial code, with the more specialized layers, such as industry-specific applications, remaining the province of private suppliers. But the operating system and middleware layers will move toward open source code because of its low cost and the inability of commercial suppliers to strongly differentiate themselves and add value at that level."


I agree with Mr. Carr in that some types of applications are well-suited for open sourcing while others are not. The large centralized suppliers like Oracle and SAP are already moving in this direction and considering what they need to do to have a smart, consistent open-source strategy. We've seen the multitude of completed and pending acquisitions from Oracle for embedded database -- namely Sleepycat, JBoss, and Zend. Certainly the open-source opportunity is there for that particular segment (i.e. a commodity embedded database segment) but will it be the case for industry-specific applications that thrive on detailed business process automation? SAP argues not:

"While open source software is known for bringing enterprise costs down, that alone may not be enough, according to SAP's Peter Graf. "What really matters is the business value you provide and how much you can provide IT value to the organizations," he said.

So business value DOES matter and open source software doesn't necessarily deliver on that. This gives SAP a sustainable advantage to maintain its current bread and butter. However, SAP would be wise to consider parts of the Netweaver stack for potential open-sourcing. One of these areas is Master Data Management (MDM). MDM has gotten a lot of flack for not being a universal, operational engine for managing all types of data and no single vendor, not Oracle, not SAP has been able to conquer this market and serve up what customers need.

Now, what if SAP were to open source its MDM code? It would be very interesting for SAP to explore the potential for open sourcing the raw technical implementation (e.g., the synchronization engine) and then capitalize on the proprietary data schema and related meta-data descriptions (i.e., sell repository and data schema implementation pre-integrated with R/3). This may be a bit too progressive but considering all of Oracle's recent moves, SAP would be smart to manage the open-source movement proactively and with a differentiated strategy - one that doesn't include buying anyone and everyone up.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Business Objects Picks Up Firstlogic

Business Objects to Acquire Firstlogic

Today, Business Objects announced its $69 million acquisition of Firstlogic, the data quality vendor. This purchase was intended to round out Business Objects' Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy. The announcement comes on the heels of a failed attempt by Pitney Bowes to purchase Firstlogic for approximately $50 million. Had Firstlogic been swallowed by Pitney Bowes, the data quality tools it offers probably would not have survived. As part of Business Objects, it will be a key component of the company's EIM plans. EIM is yet another acronym associated with MDM. MDM application functionality should include data quality capabilities. However, not all vendors have great data quality tools on offer. This acquisition certainly gives Business Objects a leg up on the EIM/MDM space.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Oracle's "Pluggable" SOA Pitch - "Hot" or Not?

First, Oracle repositions 10gAS as "middleware" in a multi-million dollar campaign and now as a "hot-pluggable" SOA suite (Jan 12, 2006). It's the same 5 or so products they keep re-packaging and pushing. In the last 12-18 months, any time anyone asked Oracle what its SOA strategy was, execs immediately deferred to the 10gAS platform. The difference is now, Oracle can defer to its "SOA suite" instead of a combination of numbers and letters only tech people understand. This repositioning only further proves the point that for Oracle, SOA has always been a product-driven sell...10gAS equals SOA. Oracle doesn't know how to wrap business process knowledge around an SOA strategy, for the company, the answer is always -- "yes, our BPEL engine can handle that" -- very telling, I say.

Now, Oracle claims the SOA suite is "hot-pluggable" meaning that it is interoperable with other vendors' middleware platforms. Is this a testament to Oracle's "openness"? Of course not, it's to sell as many pieces of 10gAS (or whatever you want to call it) as possible. Even the press saw right through the marketing.

When a journalist can decipher marketing spin (we're not even talking analysts here), then Oracle has no chance.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Hello World!

Welcome to Kosin Huang's Enterprise Software Alphabet Soup blog. I promise not to abandon this blog to a friendless life of content starvation, as long as you all continue to visit!