Oracle calms customers after $8.5 billion BEA purchase

Despite all the assurances and even Oracle’s acknowledged track record for taking care of the customers from their acquisitions, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. said he has heard rumblings to the contrary.

“The BEA customers we’ve spoken to about the Oracle deal express grave concerns about whether Oracle will support BEA’s products moving forward in spite of the fact that Oracle has a relatively good reputation for migrating customers after acquisitions,” he said. “So Oracle has more of a customer management challenge than a technical challenge to maintain relationships with BEA’s customers.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I’m in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink’s Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I’ll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We’ve posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term “SOA” can polarize some IT teams – it’s an “either/or” decision at the architectural level.

Read more at: SOA World

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Frankfurt Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 8, 2008 features:

Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Ingo Arnold, Enterprise Systems Architect, Novartis Pharma AG

Wolfgang Otto, Principal Systems Engineer, BEA Systems

Florian Mösch, Vice President Enterprise Integration & Architecture, T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH

Jason English, iTKO, iTKO

Dr. Waldemar Lohrer, Senior Berater, Swiss Life

Tim Hall, SOA Center Product Management, Hewlett-Packard

Lars Drexler, VP Sales Enablement, Software AG

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA event in Frankfurt, Germany, on January 15, 2008.

The ‘Genesis’ of a New World

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Zapthink, commented in an e-mail to SD Times that the marketing for Genesis was “right on target,” adding, “The combination of SOA, BPM and Web 2.0 to create Service-Oriented Business Applications is the key story that all vendors should be telling.”

However, Bloomberg questioned BEA’s approach, depicting it as a “platform play,” writing: “After all, the platform is what they have to sell, so any Dynamic Business Applications story coming out of BEA will necessarily have a J2EE platform at its core.”

Bloomberg acknowledged that a platform-centric view is not unique to BEA, but rather, a “disturbing trend across the software industry at large. Everybody is starting to ‘get it’–that is, understand the real value of these Dynamic Business Applications, but few if any platform vendors are ‘doing it’–that is, selling software actually designed to support this vision. Instead, they’re selling the same old middleware with some new features added–software designed for a different set of problems altogether and shoehorned into the Dynamic Business Apps vision,” he wrote.

Read more at: SD Times

David S. Linthicum: Reference Models and Architectures

Those who implement SOA have become a bit confused about the notions of SOA reference models and SOA reference architectures. Moreover, there is confusion about how they work with the more traditional concept of enterprise architecture, including all of the management and development disciplines behind EA.

So, if you’re confused, you’re not alone. There are many definitions for the concepts of SOA reference models and SOA reference architectures that are now being defined by guys like me (my models are correct, as always), standards organizations such as OASIS and the Open Group, and vendors such as IBM, Oracle, BEA and TIBCO. Sometimes they align; most of the time they do not.

Read more at: SD Times

OASIS Ramps Up SDO Efforts for SOAs

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, noted in an interview that SCA supports C++ and Python, but lacks a .NET implementation. He added that both SCI and JBI will be “marginally helpful” to architects. After all, the focus of architects is not on component architecture, but on service architecture, so architects aren’t typically thinking about Java or .NET frameworks, he explained.

Bloomberg described SCA as a way for some vendors to coalesce on the component structure in their products, but “SCA and JBI are mostly about vendor politics and hype,” according to ZapThink’s Web site.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

The Next SOA Vendor to Be Acquired!

This blog asks “Who are the SOA centric companies that have not yet been acquired?” as if they are the ugly ducklings of the SOA dating game no one wants to marry.

Joe McKendrick also writes about this subject in his April 19, 2007 dated blog entry entitled “The incredible shrinking SOA vendor pool: good or bad?” referring to David Linthicum’s opinions: “Dave Linthicum, who has been involved in plenty of IT vendor acquisitions, has been keeping tabs on the churning SOA vendor space, and estimates that anywhere between three to four dozen SOA specialty vendors have been acquired in just the last couple of years. Isn’t that a good thing? For the investors in these companies, yes. But for SOA innovation, no, Dave says. In fact, we may be losing our competitive edge in SOA as a result.”

Read more at: Sys-Con

SOA Certification

There are three SOA certification programs aimed at architects put on by IBM, BEA and ZapThink. While the early exams for the software vendor’s start off somewhat technology agnostic the advanced exams become technology specific. BEA’s exams for some reason cover BEA WebLogic Integration and not the AquaLogic service bus and BPM product from the current description on the web.

The ZapThink exam is technology agnostic and has a training curriculum aimed at differing skill levels. I cannot comment on how well this certification has been accepted in the industry, but ZapThink is well known within the SOA community. The ZapThink bootcamp agenda will give you a feel for the topics covered, for example SOA business value and governance frameworks are covered.

Read more at: IT Toolbox

The Oracle/BEA Thing

Of course, the consolidation continues in the SOA space, and the rumors and published releases around Oracle’s bid for BEA is the latest buzz. While the bloggers and reporters have been going nuts around this news item, the larger issues don’t seem to be getting the same consideration. Perhaps, because it’s more “real world” than “hype.” We love hype, we don’t like reality as much, when it comes to SOA.

BEA has been a player in the SOA space for some time now, and they are big enough to have an influence, but not too big where the larger guys can’t afford them. So, Oracle, or the other “big stack” players, was likely to take a run at them. Oracle is out of the gates first.

Read more at: InfoWorld

What Oracle/BEA could mean to SOA

Best of the blogs: When it come to SOA we like hype more than reality, asserts David Linthicum, and that is particularly true of Oracle’s acquisition bid for BEA Systems. BEA, of course, has been an SOA player, so the purchase, if it happens, would effect certain aspects of service-oriented architecture, he explains in this Real World SOA post. Then again, some truths will remain. “SOAs are architectures, and not products. So, no matter how much technology is acquired and put into an offering, that does not make it an architecture that you can buy,” Linthicum explains. “No one size fits all, sorry to break that to you … again.”

Read more at: InfoWorld