How mobile is Oracle?

Nice question if you ask me. And if you would have asked me one year ago (just after #oow10) I would have said: "Well, good question..." And like a good consultant should, adding to that: "You should look at what is already there rather than what is missing..."

This year at #oow11 it was a totally different story! Everywhere you went mobile popped up and drew attention of many people. BTW with mobile of course I mean the use of mobile platforms and devices and based on that applications that make the use of these devices fit the needs of the contemporary business user.

Another good thing to know in this context is the expectation about the usage / adoption of mobile: by 2016, there will be around 5 billion mobile users worldwide!

So let's look at a couple of examples, how Oracle is doing in the mobile area:

Padzilla

Padzilla running Fusion Tap in Action!

During Oracle OpenWorld the company Crunchy Logistics placed a so called Padzilla, a huge 70" iPad near the Exhibition grounds in the Moscone Center. It showed the Oracle Fusion Tap which is the Oracle Fusion Applications Mobile app! More on this later on in this blog post.

Oracle ADF & ADF Mobile
At #oow11 Oracle also announced the new version of Oracle ADF (Mobile)

Hottest thing here is that the framework will contain a "build once, deploy to many" feature for mobile applications. So Mobile applications will be developed from JDeveloper and at deployment time a developer can choose to which platform it needs to be deployed.

 

OBIEE goes Mobile
For OBIEE Oracle developed a brand new mobile app (currently for the iOS platform only) which enables the OBIEE dashboard on you rmobile device! As mentioned brand new so it better supports todays touchscreen gestures and also things like click through analyses, publisher reports, scorecards, alerts and catalog search.

And probably the best thing is: all BI content created within the OBIEE application is instantly available on mobile devices! No further development necesarry.

 

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
Oracle not only thought of the business user as it comes to mobile, also the Technical Administrators of business applications now have the abillity to utilize their iPad in their work environment. Let's face it: they will have the capabilities to link their devices directly to the BO systems and overcoming the technical hurdles that brings ;-)

What Oracle did is with the 12c (BTW the c of course stands for cloud)  version of Enterprise Manager, made it Mobile app enabled.
So now an administrator can be in a meeting and solve the technical database issue with your critical business application right away from his iPad or choose to deploy a test application to the Oracle Public cloud environment in one click to free up space in the companies own datacentre from his iPhone!

Fusion Applications
As mentioned earlier in this post Oracle has been further developing Fusion applications and announced a brand new mobile app which will be added to the Fusion Applications product family: Fusion Tap
 

This will bring the productivity and collaboration of Fusion Applications right to your mobile device!

But there's more...
Besides all of the examples above Oracle has also been further developing Mobile applications that were already available out there.
Examples are Siebel Sales apps and the app for WebCenter Spaces.

Is Oracle ready for mobile?
So the conclusion from this is, that yes Oracle had some catching up to do. They definitely put a lot of effort in it and to my opinion they succeeded in catching up and overtaking!

Are you currently looking for mobile appliances within your business, either provided out-of-the-box or customly built to fit your exact needs: Oracle is more than capable of fulfilling that for you.

So if you want to move mobile with your organisation / enterprise: go for Oracle!

Arjan Kramer is Solution Architect and thoughtleader for Oracle WebCenter at Capgemini. follow him at twitter.com/arjankramer

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 becomes Oracle WebCenter

As the people following Oracle’s steps in the social arena have noticed, Oracle rebranded their offering Oracle Enterprise 2.0 to Oracle WebCenter.

The reasoning behind this rebrand seems obvious: The web has a more prominent role in everybody's life then ever. Social networks to keep up-to-date with your friends, wherever they may be. But also networks to keep track of your business contacts. And what happens in the Enterprise: nothing. So it's time to do something about that. The rebrand to Oracle WebCenter reflects this: Oracle makes the Web experience through all available channels the most important aspect of their User Experience platform.

You could say that the Oracle WebCenter product stack is maturing and is getting more integrated day-by-day. As Oracle says “the different parts fit together like a puzzle”, altogether they form one user experience platform which enables a true single user experience: no matter what the channel is they use, be it mobile website, but even when they call up your contact center the same experience can be provided.

As WebCenter is the user interface of Oracle Fusion Applications, but also the future UI for other standard applications it has become a very important part of the entire Oracle Fusion Middleware product stack. Oracle continuously keeps investing in it either by developing, integrating but also buying new parts that further strengthen the product portfolio in areas were it didn’t meet the required level yet.

A recent example is the acquisition of FatWire a leading provider of web experience management solutions. So what is FatWire adding to the existing product stack? Well at the moment it’s still not completely clear how the integration will be done, but a couple of things are certain! It will be definitely used as the Web Management tool in combination with the existing UI’s. So it’s not only an addition to WebCenter, but also applications like ATG and Siebel. FatWire already succesfully integrates with those products, but will be even more integrated when it’s completely fused with the rest of the Fusion Middleware stack.

A key benefit of FatWire are the capabilities it has in the Social Tools area. FatWire is already integrated with all leading Social media which enables the direct use of these media in Marketing, CRM and Sales! Compared with the current WebCenter Suite that really is a key benefit, since this was not well developed yet.
Another key feature is the ability for so called “Business” users to be highly involved in and even in charge of the changes to the online web branding and experience. You don't need the techie guy from IT to change the header font of your news-items or adjust the layout of your online customer portal. You're in charge, if you like...
The third feature which will definitely be kept intact is Dynamic targeting, which enables real-time, context dependent content: a user will get information based on his profile, the situation he is in or the link he’s just clicked. All to get the best suitable interaction with the person you target in a campaign, on the site or in your mobile app.
Later this week Oracle will be announcing more details about the strategy with FatWire and how it will be integrated. Check back soon to read about this.

What is remarkable is that Oracle is not only talking about the Technology side of this acquisition and the rebrand. They deliberately also mention the integration with applications like ATG, Siebel CRM and Fusion Applications.

And to my opinion that’s spot on! The only way of winning todays customer in a B2C context, but also in B2B and even winning the employee of the future is to have a real social user experience in the workspace of Marketing, Sales and Service. By adding FatWire and further integrating and rebrandin gthe WbeCenter product stack, Oracle sets the future path for the enterprise: the Social Enterprise!
Don’t hesitate, because the number of “social natives” is growing day-by-day and it is not only generation-Y who will soon make up the majority of the worlds population, start becoming social!

And think about the following: What if you would combine all this power in a solution together with applications like ATG eCommerce, Siebel CRM and Identity & Access management, how powerful would that be... I’ll get back to that soon!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

Process, content and collaboration

Taking a look at today’s business, most companies still have a lot as far as adapting to and leveraging Web 2.0 possibilities is concerned. Sometimes it’s because of fear to open up, sometimes it’s non-compliancy reasons but in most case it’s still unfamiliarity with what benefits it could bring a business or what it is about anyway.

If we zoom into what Enterprise 2.0 or applying Web 2.0 within a corporate environment really implies, there are three factors that are most significant and describe the core of Enterprise 2.0:

• Process
• Content and
• Collaboration

We’ll look into each factor, see what it means and how they finally join to form Enterprise 2.0.

Process
Process means the (business) processes within a company involved in the day to day work people do within that company. This can be handling incoming calls from customers ordering goods and the entire process following that. In all cases those are little steps in the context of a larger sequence of steps. They are orchestrated or governed as you will to finally reach a particular end situation. Important in this respect is that these steps can be operated by an human-being or automated system and that the process is bound to change because of whatever influence from outside.
An aspect of web 2.0 influencing the processes is that now not only the inside of the company is involved in a process (with sometimes a starting point outside) but also the outside world is part of the process. An example of that is when Twitter is used to communicate on a particular issue back and forth or peoples comments on a blog about a new product.
In all circumstance it’s important that when people are involved, the aspect of these people interacting with each other in the steps of the process is crucial for the success.

Content
In Enterprise 2.0 sharing and combining of information is essential. The amount of information or content necessary at a given point in the overall process may vary but inevitably content is needed in order for a process step to make sense. What is important from a content perspective is also who is able to see which information, till what extend and what is the person or system allowed to do with it. This could be referred to as security of the content.
Probably the most crucial part in the content area of Enterprise 2.0 is that everyone shares the same information and people can all work together on that same content at the same time, seamlessly without worrying about things like versioning, etc.

Collaboration
Within the processes people and systems are interacting with each other, collaborating to eventually reach a certain state, product or relationship together.
The strength of people coming together and really collaborating could probably be best explained by the example of Open Source communities creating solutions. Not a single person is able to create whatever product on his own, you will always need others with particular expertise or capabilities which combine together to a particular product. In Open Source communities this is facilitated by Web 2.0 technology that enables discussions, commenting, tagging and drive decisions by rating.
Resulting in a collaborative solution in the end.

Value
We know now what the key elements of Enterprise 2.0 are, but what is it going to bring you? What value is in it from a business perspective? It should however be clear that if people start working together, supported by technology that enables sharing of the same content. And people can collaboratively combine and improve that along a joint and standardized process this will bring several advantages. Advantages like higher quality of work, more efficiency and innovation. This eventually will lead to business value like better customer support, innovative products, cost effectiveness and many more.

Probably a good thing to keep in mind when you send out your next yam or tweet …

Capgemini offers you the required technical skills to implement Enterprise 2.0 for instance by the means of Oracle Enterprise 2.0 for you, of course. More important we are able to determine together with you what the most important Enterprise 2.0 areas to focus on are, specifically for your business. Pragmatically choosing the most beneficial areas with the least effort and costs, and fitting it in with your current Oracle or non-Oracle landscape.

So if you think your company is ready to start acting in the Enterprise 2.0 arena based on the above, by working on one of the topics or a combination of these… don’t wait till your competitors start working on Enterprise 2.0, start benefiting now!

Contact us to discuss what value Oracle Enterprise 2.0 can bring your company!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

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

Oracle Business Process Management Suite, the best of both worlds

This is a joint effort post from the Dutch Oracle Technology team Léon Smiers, Ruben Spekle and Arjan Kramer on Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

Since the acquirement of BEA there has been a lot of discussion with clients around the topic of Business Processes Management or BPM. Oracle has now got two strategic components in this arena. Firstly the already existing component BPEL Process Manager (BPEL PM) in combination with the OEM-ed product Aris (Oracle BPA), and secondly the former BEA Aqualogic BPM product, now called Oracle BPM. On Oracle Open World, last October Oracle announced the unification of both products. What is the impact of this unification and when will this take place?

Oracle placed BPEL PM in its stack with the acquirement of Collaxa some years ago. In the years after the BPEL PM product was enriched with adapter functionality and a Human Task component. BPEL PM is aimed at the more low level process integration which is also known as orchestration. Because of this, designing a BPEL application is a rather technical process. For Business Analysts BPEL is too technical. In order to fill the gap for designing Business processes Oracle OEM-ed Aris and enabled the creation of BPEL models based upon Aris Business Process models. Aris is the de facto standard in the market for Business Process Management Modeling, and contains a huge stack of reference (industry) models.

In BPM creating Workflows is much easier, a Business Analyst models all the processes and creates the lines in between the process steps, based upon which run time components are created automatically. It is a complete framework for creating workflow type of applications. Besides the ease of creation of the workflow processes, BPM is very strong in the build-in mechanism for simulating processes. The designer (Business Analyst) sets timings for each step in the process and can simulate the process. Based on this simulation bottlenecks, like human tasks or asynchronous services can be easily spotted already in a design time stage, without even involving real services yet. During the runtime of a business process, audit information is captured and can be fed back to the process to be able to tune the process based on runtime information as well. This means a real roundtrip lifecycle for business processes. A third strong point is the versioning capability of components (processes, variables) within BPM which allow current versions to run in parallel. Oracle BPM hasn’t (yet) got as many adapters as BPEL, but integration with the use of Web Services works very well.

On Oracle Open World (October 2009), Oracle announced BPM, BPEL PM and Human Tasks will be moved into one Business Process Management Suite. During OOW there were possibilities to get hands-on with this new stack which looked really promising, the same excellent process definition functionality BEA Aqualogic BPM users were used to, extended with integration with BPEL, Human Tasks and other service components all combined in one single stack. In this process of unification predominately the BPM part will be changed. BPM will be based upon the BPMN 2.0 standard, the design time moves towards to both JDeveloper (the implementation part) and the Browser (Design time) and the run time will be based upon a shared runtime environment with BPEL PM. The BPEL PM product on the other hand stays rather untouched in the unification process.
In this architecture BPM, BPEL, Human Tasks and Aris support the following functionality:

• BPM supports the Choreography type of functionality, and is more aimed at Business Analysts.
• BPEL PM supports Orchestration, low level process integration, and is more aimed at technical people.
• Human Tasks support the workflow component of a process, whether this is started from within BPM or BPEL PM.
• Aris is used by Enterprise Architects and Business Analysts on a high level.

Unfortunately Oracle does not provide any dates when a version will be released and what functionality it will contain, but we can be convident that it will be available somewhere in the first half of 2010. In the meantime we still can use both separate Process Management solutions, with a preference for the BPEL over BPM, because of expected minor migration complexities towards future releases.

Léon Smiers is Oracle Solution Architect at Capgemini, you can follow him on Twitter
Arjan Kramer is leading an Expert group of Java based Integration Technologists and is thoughtleader on Oracle Fusion Middleware at Capgemini. Follow his thoughts on Twitter
Ruben Spekle is Oracle Solution Architect within Capgemini, you can follow him on Twitter

Originally posted on the Capping IT Off  blog

Oracle is still buying the Sun…

A lot of you (at least the people in the Java community) are probably curious what the status is of Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Well since this is a merger that really has a great impact on the market, organizations around the globe sense that it must be considered thoroughly. This means that both the European Union as well as U.S. officials are taking their time to review the deal.
At least Sun’s shareholders have approved the acquisition now.

Pitty
The slow process might be good for the law enforcers that are evaluating the acquisition, it’s not that good of course for Sun and Oracle at least but also for the Java market as a whole. Uncertainty whether this acquisition will proceed or not will make potential customers hesitate. That will not only influence Sun and Oracle’s position at customers, but also competitors like IBM.

Competition
Meanwhile the competition is also taking advantage of the indistinctness in both the hardware area  as well as the software area.

Still this merger of a company which is really dedicated to best way of applying Java and Java Enterprise Edition as the firm basis for their complete product stack and the company that founded Java seems a very good move. Since Java is so crucial for Oracle and the success of their products they would be mad not to keep most of the Java community that is in place currently intact and leverage it. Only because of this vivid community around Java is what it is now, a firm and stable infrastructure for a wide variety of business applications and improving all the time.

Of course Oracle will have to make sure that the competitors that base their products on Java, get their take at improving Java and give input to it. Only this way Oracle, together with the other Java based companies will be able to fight the battle against Microsoft and their .Net platform.

The story continues, the next step will be on September 3. as the European Union will announce whether the acquisition can take place or they will need to do a more thorough investigation. Fingers crossed it will be the first option and the merger will not be postponed needlessly more.

Original post on: Capping IT Off

Oracle buys the sun

Yesterday Oracle shocked the world by announcing it will acquire SUN Microsystems. Now, the day after it's a good moment to take a look at what hit us...

As we all know Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the last couple of years. Although this is not the largest purchase (e.g. BEA and Peoplesoft were larger) and not the smallest (Hyperion wasn’t that big) to my opinion this is one which is really one of the most significant ones. SUN being the founder of Java and a lot of Open Source programs it is a unique step in history!

So what's behind it? Well, as Larry Ellison puts it in his voice over (which can be found here) the solid reason for it is Oracle's strategy to be Complete, Open and Integrated.

Complete
Well Oracle can definitely say they are complete now: from applications, through Fusion Middleware, security and governance all the way down to virtual machines (Java and hypervisor), databases and Operating systems and as a small plus even hardware: SUN Sparc server technology. You would say this completes the total stack...

Open and Integrated
Because of the wide variety of products within their stack Oracle has a strong strategy on integrating their products. Fusion applications, means seamless integration of all applications with each other, but also with customly build component based applications all the way down to the way the connect with their data-storage and OS. The heart of Fusion applications is Oracle Fusion Middleware, the number 1 middleware stack out there, believe me this is not a Oracle commercial, it's really great! And as you might know it's Java based Integration technology. This means by buying the founder of Java the key of the innovative power behind Java is in good hands since Java is the key foundation of the Fusion middleware stack and thus the Fusion application strategy.
So how about Open then?! Well let's be honest, when a company has so many products in its product stack, the only way to get all of those components integrated is to use Open standards and adopt Open source components. Like with other acquisitions it's my opinion, that Oracle will only pick the cherries especially for the Open Source projects they will contribute to, of course. But they will definitely be contributing and actively invest in Open standards and Open Source projects, simply because they have to, to reach their goals in integrating the complete product stack.

So, I think this acquisition will mean great new investments in Java, it gives another boost to the development of Fusion Middleware and thus Fusion Applications and it makes Oracle a true one-stop-shop which give major TCO benefits.

Question is what will be next? Will Oracle be buying the moon?

Original post on: Capping IT Off

Nothing but the real thing... Well...

So here I was telling you that with conferences there's nothing but the real thing. And that conference will never be replaced by online conferences.

Well I must admit, although there is going to be a Oracle Open World again this year, and thus the "live" are there to stay, I just found out that on 19th February Oracle has it's first online Virtual Conference.

Well we'll see how this evolves..., although I still think that 'there's nothing but the real thing' as far as conferences are concerned. It's good to have these virtual conferences, but this will not mean the real ones will be over.

Java based Integration Technology

So how hot is Java these days? A lot of enterprises are moving from Customized Software Development towards standard applications. You would expect that Java's footprint is decreasing because of this movement as would Microsoft actually.

Well let's focus on middleware or integration software. A lot of effort (and they're succeeding) is put in creating integration platforms, like ESB's or BPM environments, just to minimize the amount of coding and the possible errors you introduce with it. Resulting in robust, state-of-the-art firm bases for your business technology. This means that enterprises will want to move from error-prone custom-built applications to more standardized and configuration based way of developing applications based on services.

So what does this mean for the good old Java programmer then?! Hmmm... well this might be like telling a turkey what's on for the christmas dinner, but eventually we won't be coding a lot anymore. Sorry guys but it's the way it is. I'm not sure how long it will take, but the day will come... Currently we are already sensing this quite a lot at our customers.

But now the good part! If you take a look at the best-of-breed integration or middleware software out there you'll find out that most (if not all, after all I said best-of-breed ;-)) of these are Java based! WebMethods, Tibco, BEA / Oracle Fusion Middleware, SAP Netweaver, IBM Websphere, to name just a few insignificant ones are all Java based. This means, and it will keep meaning in my opinion that in order to tweak / configure or even add that specific functionality that's just not available out-of-the-box will definitely require that good old java skilled developer to do the trick.

So will this be the end of Java?
No! Because it's gonna be Java based Integration Technology!

The I in IT...

Today during lunch I had a nice discussion with some colleagues about information sharing between for instance the Dutch government and the US government whenever someone is flying to the US.

It's interesting that especially people in the IT industry are pretty paranoia about their personal info and who get's hold of it. Probably because we know what you could do with the information if you get hold of it.

Personally, I think that it is no problem if information is shared as long as the purpose is clear and it can really prevent something or enable pro-active handling. That's currently not yet the case I think. To my opinion a lot of information is shared and stored, only to be touched whenever something has already gone wrong, not before...

Another interesting thought is what if, like with open source software, everyone would share all of his own details? I know that currently nobody would present his bank-account balance on a blog or post his mortgage details on twitter. But it's an interesting thought... Who would have predicted that today so many software vendors would provide the source code of their software to the community years ago?

Who knows what happens to the I in IT :-)

Nothing but the real thing

I'm writing this in the train back home from the airport. Just had a 10 hour flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam. Actually not the best part of the whole thing, but it's definitely worth it. Meeting people, attending sessions, eating the sponsored lunches, going to the customer appreciation event, Oracle OpenWorld was great! It was fantastic!

I was just thinking of the fact that in IT currently Social Computing, collaboration or Enterprise 2.0 within the boundaries of an enterprise are very hot things. So you'd think that with all new technology in place in a couple of years attending a conference might mean not going there physically, but virtually.
To my opinion attending a conference will not be as much fun, and as worthwhile then now.

I think that conferences like this, although technology is advancing rapidly will still be about people flying in from all over the world and meeting each other, no chat or webcam session can change that. I saw a lot of people finally meeting each other after a long while of being in email contact or even chatting or blogging together and everyone start smiling at that point.

Nothing but good old human interaction, face to face, discussing live and drinking beers together.

Nothing but the real thing.

CTRL + Shift what a combo..

Windows (XP or Vista) users in the US probably don't experience this, but Europeans do: There is a "hidden feature" in both XP and Vista namely the CTRL and Shift shortcut that really changes things drastically in your Windows environment...

So what is the shortcut all about?! Well it switches the keyboard layout to the next keyboard layout that is setup on your computer. So what is the big deal? You'll only have one keyboard layout, right?! So no sweat! Well if you live in the US that's correct, but if you live in The Netherlands for instance and you selected your own time zone and country during initial setup, Windows will do a couple of nifty things for you automatically...

Windows will automatically create settings for your home language AND create a keyboard layout setting, the default one for your country, although in a lot of countries the keyboard layout is US 101.

And there you are working on some document or Java code or even writing a blog. You intend to select a  line or a couple of words so you press CTRL + Shift. You change your mind so you don't press any other key while holding down CTRL + Shift and you release them. Et-voila! when you continue typing you find out that a lot of the keys you hit do not turn out to be the keys you intended to use!

Actually I myself found out this "hidden feature" already a couple of years ago, but it seems today a lot of people are still suffering from this: closing all programs, rebooting windows or even reinstalling Windows to get rid of the problem.

So the one feature I would definitely want to be in Windows 7 or actually NOT to be in the system is the default keyboard layout switching shortcut CTRL + Shift.

Thank you Microsoft. Maybe Bill and Seinfeld can record an item on this topic, sounds like a lot a of fun to me...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Policies, SCA, Beehive and...

Most of the conferences have a couple of things they want you to take home. Although I understand that last year was already about SCA and policies, it's still pounding here now. And of course Beehive... Well BEA had Beehive as their "making life easy", "Spring like" framework, but is brand new! Or isn't it...

Well actually Oracle Beehive is actually an awful lot like the Liquid Enterprise BEA revealed at BEA World in 2007. Then again, that's one of the reasons why they bought BEA, so no wonder!

SCA is hot at Oracle OpenWorld as well. They are pushing mainly the Weblogic Application Server platform and the BPEL / BPM products forward as their SCA enabling platform, ready for the agile Enterprise future. I'm not so sure yet about the real advantage of SCA over plain old BPM. So mainly what the added value is above having business processes being defined is that you have a good notion of what is in your composition (which services), what the interfaces (dependencies) to other components are and what the properties for the component are. You still have the point (as with BPM) that services are deployed over several systems and you'll have a deployed composition of the services on another system. A good thing is that you're not restricted to having Web Services, with SCA a composition might also contain Java classes or .Net classes. Which actually could be done with BPM using for instance the Oracle Service Bus! Nevertheless SCA is a nice clean way of composing Service based applications and since Oracle is pushing it might be here to stay.
It seems however it is mainly a technology thing, which might not make it up to deciding business level.

The scoop of the conference was actually presented on Wednesday by Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) in what you can best summarize as a sales pitch or commercial of about 30 minutes of the new HP - Oracle Exadata Data server.
Cool server technology but I did not like the presentation actually. Rather then setting out the new Oracle way forward he spent the whole presentation, which looked a bit unprofessional("next slide please...") on how good the relationship with HP is (elephants do love elephants) and what a perfect hardware / software combination they created for handling bigger and bigger query data throughput demands. Impressive, but I didn't like the keynote at all!
Just to be complete a little info on the Exadata servers technology. The server consists of several high performing Disks combined with Intel processors for running queries on the data. This together with a high bandwidth data pipe for sending out data puts together the Exadata server. The real trick with the server is that queries are performed on the same server that hosts the data (not on a separate server) and only the result data is passed to the database server that requested the query.
This can be a good thing for some of the Oracle customers, but it will be a limited set. The other thing is: how about inserts, updates and delete? These servers are mainly tuned for high performance on querying, not for those. Maybe next year...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Tom Kyte keynote - The best way...

Just went to see Tom Kyte's keynote titled "The best way...". It once again made me realize that trying to aim for simple solutions is the best way to do things. He had one slide in his presentation stating: "you don't need 14 tiers in every solution to get things working!".

It all comes down to K.I.S.S. (Keep IT Simple, Stupid!)

To my opinion that goes for a lot of aspects of software engineering; In his case it's Database design and query / data retrieval optimization (Tom Kyte is thé Guru on Oracle Database technology) in other cases it's Software design and Software implementation or Software Configuration Management. Another one is Architecture... Just take that 14 tier example into account...

So why is it that in Software development, and typically in the Java world, people tend to over complicate things? Is it to prove own knowledge? Or to impress other people? Or does it have to do with the Software development industry, especially Java, being rather young and thus not so detailed out?

Well I'm not sure what the answer is. What I do know is that keeping things simple can make it a lot better to understand for people and in the end get more appreciation.
I think there is a lot of analogy with music, where some of the greatest hits in history consist of a very simple chord scheme and very easy tunes.

So let's Keep things simple!

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Sunday 9/21/2008

Well today started pretty nice actually, we did not go to the sessions this morning... because there weren't any!

Instead we spent the morning cycling up the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond to the Vista Point, which is at the other side of the GG bridge in the National Park. A hell of a ride (by bike that is) but normally (if there's no fog) the view on San Francisco, the bridge and the bay would have been more than worth it. Would have been, because when we arrived up there, the clouds and fog moved in and all of  a sudden the view was gone! The trip was worthwhile nevertheless.

In the afternoon I went to three sessions:

• The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
• Introduction to Web Service Manager

The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
The first session described the past, the present and the future (of course with the disclaimer: "...nothing in this presentation can be held against us...") of Application servers. 
One of the conclusions of the session was that J EE will continue to play a big roll in Enterprise development. I think so too, but what will be key for JEE is that there needs to change something to the complexity of the platform in terms of what can and must be used. This implies that for instance if I'm only using Servlets, JSP's, some JDBC and some EJB's in my application I should not have to load (in memory) all of the things needed for for instance JMS and all of the other JEE parts that are available in an application server. This will make the memory footprint and by that the necessary resources for an application very much smaller and thus performance and necessary resources will benefit of that.
For this exact reason the Oracle Weblogic team is really pushing hard to get so called "profiling" into JEE 6, which is due somewhere in 2009. This will (when the 6.0 standard is implemented) eventually lead to a more monolithic Application server. The term the presenter used is "WYGIOWYN": What You Get Is What You Really Need!
Actually SpringSource is working on the exact same thing with there SpringSource DM Application server!

One of the other trends (which you already see actually) will be that more and more POJO's will become important (Spring, etc.), as well as the support of other more scripting oriented languages to be ported on Java / JEE. This is mainly because newer languages are suffering of the lack of a good runtime environment which the JVM (with approx. 2000 man centuries of R&D) is nowadays. This means that the JVM is actually a very good runtime to host new languages, which will mean porting of the languages, like JRuby, etc.

The last point I'd like to mention is SCA, it really seems like Oracle has adopted SCA (Service Component Architecture) which will also need it's support in for instance the Weblogic Application Server platform. I'll come back on SCA in one of the following posts.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
Other than what you would expect from the session title, this session was mainly on the roadmap of the Weblogic Application server. The guy presenting it was a good prototype of a "businetized" nerd (he was wearing a suit, but was really into technical details :-)). I'll give you some highlights on this:

- Policies
- SOAP attachments (MTOM)
- Dual WS stack (supporting both JAX-WS and JAX-RPC)
- JDeveloper dev environment -> HTTP Analyzer / WS testing
- Although Workshop might be around for a while for J2EE development.

Roadmap: FMW 11g R1, 1st half of 2009 mainly combining WLS 10.3 and OAS 10.1.3.x

Introduction to Web Service Manager
Although I know it is not really the case I can't help thinking that Oracle's WSM product does really do a lot of things the old Aqualogic Service Bus is already capable of itself. I'm having a session on that on Tuesday, so I'll keep you posted on this...

More to follow...

"Sun targets BEA WebLogic users"

I read this article a couple of weeks ago about Sun's new strategy to try to get current / former BEA Weblogic users to move over to SUN Java CAPS, SUN's SOA Platform.

Sun tries to convince people to start using their platform with some kind of simple SOA TCO calculator. To my opinion a little to short to conclude the TCO of SOA based on the parameters (# of sockets (per core), # of employees and # of years).

Well it might convince people to start looking a little closer to investments in SOA, which is good. Probably the outcome will be that they will conclude to go for SOA players like Oracle - BEA.

We'll see...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: It started!

Well yesterday (Saturday 9/20/20008) I flew in from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for joining the Oracle Open World (OOW) conference 2008 in San Francisco. The flight was pretty good, no delay (we had a direct flight) and no real "roller coaster rides". Although 10 hours straight flying can be a pretty hard time...

After waiting for a colleague flying in from Detroit, we went to the Hilton Hotel, where we're staying and checked in. Nice hotel, no problemos there ;-) So that one's also checked!

Then the registration part of the conference: We went to the Moscone center, actually the hart of the conference and checked-in there. Retrieving our Full-conference passes and the goodies. We also found out to be able to see the really good stuff (sessions) we'll need to register for the Oracle Develop part of the conference, which cost an additional $100! They try to make money out of everything... Found out that due to the fact that I've been to BEA world in Barcelona last year officially I belong the veterans, being an Alumni member, meaning that I received even more goodies than "normal" registrants ;-)

Having this one settled as well we took a stroll around the city center, walking along the streets of China town, Italian quarter, seeing the Pyramid building and finally ending up at a place called Burgermeister. Very nice how the made an art out of making real Hamburgers and actually very good fries! Good thing my wives not with me because there was a lot of garlic in the stuff...

Feelings so far: so I've been to big conferences before, but this one is actually the most big and impressive one! I'm not sure about the exacts figures, but something like 1200+ presentations, keynotes and labs and about 45.000 people visiting the place from literally all of the world. In the plane I sat next to a guy from Latvia and behind me a couple from Italy, I heard some Scandinavians (Denmark, Norway) and go on... This is really big.

So what's next: this morning (I'm writing this at 3:44, jet-lag -> so what to do else :-)) we planned to go biking across the Golden Gate bridge and ride into the National Park right across the bridge to have some nice views of the bay. Later on today some sessions on SOA (Fusion) and Java (mainly the old BEA stuff) are planned. I'm really excited to see what the strategy Oracle layed out in July actually really implies. I'll keep you posted with my findings :-)

Oracle acquires BEA cont...

Here's a little on the new plans.
Oracle has voted BEA's JRockit to be their strategic JVM meaning so much that the Oracle – BEA products that are built upon a JVM will by default support the JRockit JVM and will all benefit from the enhanced features of JRockit. Furthermore the products will also support other JVMs like Sun, HP UX JVM, etc.
Secondly BEA’s Weblogic (Application) Server has also been voted as Oracle’s strategic JEE container. This means that all of the Oracle – BEA products running within a JEE container (environment) will by default use the Weblogic Server JEE platform and benefit from the enhanced features like High availability and scalability. But again other JEE platforms like SUN, JBOSS, etc. are still supported and, like Oracle stated it during the webcast the Oracle – BEA products will be hot-pluggable with these JEE platforms.
Later I’ll add some comments on BPM and WLI…
cheers,
Arjan