The open and adaptive enterprise

In Gartner’s yearly CIO agenda survey Web 2.0 is the third topic from a technology perspective on a CIO’s agenda. After Virtualization and Cloud computing by the way which are first and second. This means that the notion that companies need to start thinking of applying Web 2.0, or in enterprise terms probably Enterprise 2.0 / Enterprise Social computing is becoming clearer. Or even better that CIO’s begin to understand that in today’s business, the use of social computing could help to differentiate from competitors.

E2.0 Business Models
In E2.0 three Business Models can be distinguished, the Open Enterprise, the Adaptive Enterprise and the Social Enterprise.
The Open Enterprise is the enterprise that takes advantages of adhering to open standards and by that enabling it to easily interact and connect to other businesses or customers.
The Adaptive Enterprise leverages modern technologies like BPM and SOA (even Service Component Architecture - SCA) to adapt to new business situations easily and benefit from it fast and without high investments.
The Social Enterprise focuses on involving existing social networks and collaborating with customers or other resources in their Eco system.

Currently both the open and adaptive enterprises are the ones that really matter, since for most companies the social enterprise is still a bridge to far.

There’s help!
So how can Oracle Enterprise 2.0 help in establishing business solutions that enable the open and / or adaptive enterprise?
First of all since Oracle Fusion Middleware (which Oracle Enterprise 2.0 is part of) is all open standards based (Java, JEE, JSR168 Portlet standard, etc.) it enables ease of integration of business services of several sources, like other vendors or cloud. This brings real integration and combining or mashup if you will, of functionality to the next level. It truly enables the open enterprise.

Secondly Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 platform containing both the next generation of User Interfaces as well as excellent Enterprise Content Management (ECM) combines this with Business Process Management (BPM) technology Out-of-the-box. So how does that help you?
By combining E2.0 with BPM, Oracle enables the agility to change business processes virtually on the fly. This means that really if you run into the fact that a business process changes due to either an internal event like rearranging departments or an external event like a competitors new service offering, you can change the process with no or very less IT department involvement. This was also displayed yesterday during Larry Ellison’s keynote at Oracle Open World in the Oracle Fusion Applications sneak preview.

So would you like to build an open and adaptive enterprise? Giving you the ability to integrate your business processes with your eco system and fast adaptation to change? Oracle Enterprise 2.0 might very well be the way to go for you! And who knows by achieving that, becoming a social enterprise is just an easy next step!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

Oracle Fusion Apps: The power of waiting

It looks like in two weeks from now, at Oracle Open World 2010 Oracle will finally be announcing Oracle Fusion Applications, the next generation of Oracle’s package based applications.

During the last years Oracle has been postponing the launch of Fusion Apps, because of changes in the technology stack underneath it and also strategic changes in their company. And this despite the fact that SAP already launched a similar approach of their applications a couple of years ago.
So why did Oracle take such a long time and why would that be beneficial?

Strategy
In the last years Oracle has been doing a couple of strategic acquisitions and of those acquisitions, the SUN and BEA deals are the most significant ones. These acquisitions are strategic for the development of Oracle’s Fusion Applications because by doing so Oracle has been setting the firm basis for their applications.
With the best of breed application server (Weblogic) as the basis of the development platform and on top of that a superior integration stack with products like Oracle Service Bus and Oracle BPEL Process Manager which now form the basis for fully integrated Service Component Architecture (SCA). Topped off with Oracle Webcenter Suite as it’s Enterprise 2.0 / UI layer suite, Oracle completes an entire stack for building the next generation of agile, built for change, business applications.
Of course since besides the Database everything in the Oracle productstack is or will become Java based, this is one of the big reasons for the acquisitions of SUN Microsystems.

Development
As with all of their products Oracle has spent a lot of money in the last years and still is investing in further development of the acquired products to form a fully integrated platform. This platform (Fusion Middleware 11g) is the firm basis of the Fusion Applications; Business functions are offered as services through the Middleware integration stack and composite applications can be created in which standard applications are combined with custom, justifiably unique functionality to form one business application. Ending up in one single User Interface based upon Webcenter Suite which enables end users to setup their working environment to meet their specific needs in an iGoogle manner.
Keep in mind that Oracle, by developing the Fusion applications using their own Fusion Middleware stack is eating their own dogfood (pretty tasteful if you ask me!) and enables customers to use the same platform to develop their own applications in exactly the same manner as Fusion Applications. This way integration of or mashing up standard functionality with custom, high value, business specific functionality becomes easier then ever before!

Involvement
One of the strategic steps in development of the Oracle Fusion Applications was to involve key customers and partners in the beta-testing of the Fusion Applications. Being a key partner, Capgemini was one of few parties that were involved in this beta-testing. Of course under NDA, but the information as described in this blog is nothing more then a gathering of the information which is shared with the public already.
During the beta-test Capgemini key Oracle-consultants have scrutinized the beta-versions and collaborated with Oracle to rework their findings into the products.

The power of waiting
As mentioned before, SAP has launched a similar approach earlier than Oracle did. The big difference between the two launches is that SAP had been developing the integration stack and is still developing it while already launching the new applications approach. What customers noticed along the way is that the platform was (and is) far from mature enough to enable the SOA based business agility they would like to achieve.  
By waiting for the right moment on which the complete stack was ready for developing a real innovative and future proof (also think of cloud / on demand movement) application stack, Oracle has proved to be a company which builds businesses. By not falling in the trap of a fast go to market, but waiting for a certain level of maturity, Fusion Applications can really make a difference for businesses. Of course the platform will not be perfect all from the start,  but it is definitely by far the best agile business application suite at this time.

During and after Oracle Open World 2010 me and my colleagues will give you updates and more details on Fusion Applications.

This blog was originally posted on Capgemini’s Oracle Blog

Weblogic or wait?

That was the title of an Oracle symposium I attended a couple of weeks ago. I was part of a panel discussing Oracle BPM especially the upcoming version Oracle BPM 11g somewhere in the summer of this year.

The title was chosen because of several existing Oracle customers currently hesitating whether the should choose to stay at previous Oracle products (like Oracle ESB and Oracle IAS / OC4J) or move over to the new strategic products like Weblogic Server and Oracle Service Bus.

Good point, but too generic to discuss this for several customer cases in general. Some customers are still running fine on their Oracle SOA Suite 10g platform. And will be able to get that supported, due to Oracle’s continue en converge strategy. Typically those applications are less business critical or simply would not benefit from moving over to the new platform.

So when would you move over to the new Oracle Technology? Well as always there can be several reasons, but let’s mention a few and elaborate on them…

TCO, of course can be one of the drivers. Easier maintenance tasks, better scaling possibilities, better performance (meaning less hardware) all have a beneficial impact on cost of ownership. But there’s more..

Business agility (yes now we’re talking!) with new deployment techniques rolling out new solutions, either Java EE or SOA based (Oracle Service Bus, Oracle BPEL / BPM) applications becomes significantly easier and faster! This means that acting on business changes by changing your business applications is not a months long nightmare anymore.

Peace of mind with older technology giving you headaches only to keep it running and up-to-date, moving over to the newer Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware introduces you to a highly integrated technology environment. Because of the better support for isolating issues, better performance, far better monitoring functionality, easier deployment and rollback mechanisms, it will give you the peace of mind you need to really work on the topics you want to work on:
developing the nice business applications that make the difference for a company opposed to their competitors!

So if you ask me: “new technology or wait?” I’d say don’t wait, but GO-GO-GO!

Originally posted on Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off