Oracle to put Fusion middleware in Amazon Compute Cloud

The tools are now “tightly integrated” with the re-branded Oracle WebLogic server. In a recent interview Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, said WebLogic was the crown jewel in the BEA acquisition and filled a gaping hole in Fusion.

“If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice,’ what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody,” Bloomberg said.

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Filling Holes in the SOA Stack with Runtime Governance

ZapThink considers runtime SOA governance a requirement of successful SOA, greatly increasing the chances that the SOA implementation will have business value. Indeed, the lack of adequate runtime SOA governance greatly reduces the chances of success. The ability to create and monitor policies, manage performance, secure the system, and provide self-healing mechanisms means the SOA implementation will provide ongoing value through productivity benefits.

However, most SOA stack vendors do not address many of the key requirements of SOA, including solution patterns around runtime SOA goverance. Considering this limitation, it’s important to address these issues with the proper technology, leveraged in the proper way. Thus, the purpose of this paper.

Oracle buys ClearApp for SOA management

ClearApp’s technology provides “deep visibility into the components underlying SOA-based composite applications,” but the acquisition also raises questions, as it follows related purchases of companies like Auptyma and Moniforce, said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg in an e-mail Tuesday.

“Just how many management vendors does Oracle need to acquire before they have a coherent SOA management story that’s not just more of their Frankenstein strategy? (That is, put together a lot of parts and hope for lightning),” Bloomberg wrote.

“Oracle does have quite a bit of experience in assimilating acquired technologies, and they’re also known for taking care of the customers that come along as a result, but every such acquisition sets the bar of success higher for them,” he added.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Oracle acquires SOA management vendor

“Deep visibility into the components underlying SOA-based composite applications is a critical part of the SOA management story, and that’s what ClearApp brings to Oracle,” wrote Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner with ZapThink, in an e-mail.

However, Bloomberg commented that the acquisition raises more questions than it answers, noting that Oracle had already acquired a group of companies that develop similar products, such as Auptyma, BEA Systems, Confluent Software and Moniforce.

Bloomberg questioned how many management vendors Oracle must acquire before it has a coherent SOA management story, and he said that the company was essentially following a “Frankenstein” strategy by putting a lot of parts together and “hoping for lightning.”

“Will Oracle be able to take this cobbled-together story and compete both with the established incumbents like HP and IBM Tivoli, as well as focused players like Tidal Intersperse?” he asked. He added that Oracle has experience in assimilating acquired technologies and for taking care of customers that come along as a result.

“But every such acquisition sets the bar of success higher for them,” he observed.

Read more at: SD Times

XTP powers SOA

OA is all about events, as Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, has been telling us for some time. “Our perspective is that SOA should fundamentally be event-driven,” he said when interviewed for an article on event-processing.

Bloomberg went on to say: “In SOA, services communicate by sending and/or receiving messages, and messages are essentially software events. That is how the system reflects a business event. So in a fully realized SOA implementation, the traffic you’d expect to see on the network will consist of services and service consumers madly exchanging messages – or in other words, large numbers of events in what you might call an event cloud.”

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Oracle re-brands BEA WebLogic as its strategic server for SOA

The rapid re-branding of WebLogic indicates that it was one of the crown jewels Oracle was seeking in acquiring BEA, since the Oracle server was not a market leader, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

Analyzing today’s announcement, Bloomberg said, “If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice,’ what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

Oracle Lays out BEA Product Strategy

While Kurian argued that Oracle has already made great strides in the roughly six weeks since the deal closed, numerous challenges still lie ahead for the company due to product overlap, according to Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink.

“On the plus side, however, Oracle has a good track record in supporting the customers of acquired companies,” he said in an e-mail message. “They know the BEA acquisition was mostly about customer acquisition, so they’re likely to bend over backwards to keep BEA’s customers around. But on the technology side, the integration will keep their hands full.”

Read more at: PC World

Make Everyone a Winner

Oracle has been having trouble delivering on its Fusion middleware vision, which ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg once called a “Frankenstein” approach to SOA, assembling various parts from different places. The question, he posed, is will it all work when it’s done? But Zotto also noted that BEA’s AquaLogic has been only slightly more successful, garnering about 10 percent of the market versus Oracle’s 8.5 percent. Part of the reason is that they’re based on application servers, which were created before Web services were on anyone’s lips. And then there’s the threat from open-source.

Read more at: SD Times

SCA and SDO standards

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a specification that describes a model for building applications and systems using the core notions of SOA. SCA encourages an organization of business application code based upon components that implement business logic, which offer their capabilities through service-oriented interfaces and which consume functions offered by other components through service-oriented interfaces, called service references.

When building SCA components, you need to move through two major steps. First, the implementation of service components provides services, as well as consumes other services. Second, the assembly of sets of components to build business applications, through the wiring of service references to services.

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The SOA implications of Oracle’s BEA purchase

While not doubting Oracle’s interest in WebLogic, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., said the fate of BEA’s AquaLogic SOA product line is not so clear.

“We see this deal more about WebLogic than AquaLogic — that is, more about BEA’s J2EE offering and customers than their SOA story,” Bloomberg said. “As the Oracle Fusion story shapes up, it has become a stronger SOA story than AquaLogic ever was, so the addition of BEA will provide only marginal benefit there. But in the J2EE space, Oracle has lagged behind BEA for years, so the combined company will be better able to take on IBM in that part of the market.”

“Ellison’s quote is disingenuous on its face, because it would be expected that Oracle’s products are more valuable to Oracle’s customers than competitors’ products, or those organizations wouldn’t be Oracle’s customers in the first place,” the ZapThink analyst said. “But that doesn’t mean that IBM’s products aren’t more valuable to IBM’s customers or similarly with any other vendor’s products.”

Read more at: SearchSOA