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What's Next
Looking ahead, Mohindroo says three major trends are driving SOA innovation.
One is the move toward a "shared services infrastructure." This refers to a common set of services that are shared across multiple departments and organizations within and across the enterprise. For example, customer information that crosses multiple departments: human resources, finance, marketing, sales, etc.
Another trend is the emergence of extreme transaction processing (XTP)-or the ability to deliver mainframe quality of service using lower-cost server clusters. This enables large-scale business transactions and is a requirement for complex event processing and distributed in-memory data caching.
The third trend is the growing use of "information as a service," or delivering information access to complex, heterogeneous data sources as reusable services.
Industry analysts and customers say Oracle is effectively addressing the SOA market through its own products and its work with business partners. "Over the last few years, Oracle has invested a great deal and built a SOA software business larger than many of its rivals," says Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research.
Because Oracle has based its business applications on its SOA middleware, "Oracle application customers will necessarily become Oracle SOA customers," Finley says. He says the reason for this is that most Oracle applications require Oracle's SOA middleware at a certain version level. "When customers upgrade to that version level, they have to install parts of Oracle's SOA middleware in order to continue to run their applications. Oracle doesn't necessarily charge for the middleware, but the fact is those customers have become Oracle middleware customers and they need to build or buy skills to manage it. Once they have those skills, Oracle middleware becomes a natural choice for future middleware purchases."
The burden then falls on competitors to show why the customer needs a second set of SOA software, Finley says. The combination of strong products, substantial market share and its application advantage gives Oracle a chance to dominate the SOA software market in the future, he says.
Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of consulting and research firm Hurwitz & Associates, says Oracle's strategy has been to build or buy a complete SOA environment so that organizations have one place to go for SOA. "The premise is SOA is complicated, so if you can go to one vendor [and] they can do it all, then you're going to be better off," she says.
Move Inc., operator of Move.com, a real-estate search engine, and Realtor.com, the official site of the National Association of Realtors, went to Oracle for help with its SOA implementation. Move is using BPEL for application integration development, ESB to virtualize Web services, and Web Services Manager for Web service security.
"Oracle has acquired a number of technologies over last few years and [has] integrated these technologies to work with each other very well," largely due to a standards-based approach, says Mike Remedios, CTO of Move.
Oracle is "using the same technologies and embedding them into [its] acquired application," he says.
For example, he says, Oracle's Application Integration Architecture packs provide integration between Oracle Application and products from Siebel, which Oracle acquired in 2005. The "future roadmap of Oracle applications have SOA at the center," he says. "This shows their commitment to the SOA."
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