Technology Insights

Oracle's affair with ExaLove

2011-06-03T07:56:00.001-07:00

If anyone is following the press around Oracle, it is hard to miss Oracle’s infatuation with Exa. It started with ExaData, the database machine that was so fast it supposedly improved the collective productivity of the human race by 300%. (Of course, these claims are still waiting to be independently validated by IBM).

The Exadata release was followed by “Exalogic”. It is now customary to expect at least 5 mentions of Exalogic in even the simplest of conversations that anyone would have with an Oracle representative. I have a sense that Oracle employees greet each other with “Exalogic, Exalogic, Exalogic” in the corridors at work. (Imagine bowing 3 times while saying those words).

I had the opportunity to evaluate Exalogic (at close range) recently and I think I am starting to understand the reason behind this excitement. It is not Exadata or Exalogic alone that has got the Oracle Universe a-buzz, it is the possibilities that Exa brings to the IT and business landscape.

Exalogic is a sister offering to Exadata, and is an “application” machine. It is ENGINEERED from hardware on up to provide an application platform that is built like a tank, and computes at the speed of thought. This makes it an extremely attractive platform for organizations looking to build a cloud environment.

I anticipate that post-Exalogic, Oracle will start coming up with a whole host of pre-built appliances that are specialized for a niche area (think data warehouse appliance, BI appliance, sector-specific appliance) while continuing to provide an as-you-want platform in Exalogic.

I can see where the infatuation for “Exa” comes from, and look forward to seeing the vision materialize.

Manufacturing Clouds - 3D Printing

2011-03-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the technology section of the economist discussed advances in 3D printing. This technology allows users to literally print out objects of everyday use. This “additive” approach to manufacturing as opposed to the traditional approach which is “subtractive” in nature, allows for much more economy in terms of use of raw material. It is also highly custom as each print run can be unique. The cost for each item is limited to the raw material (titanium powder, synthetic plastic, etc…) required for that build. An entire production line does not need to be designed (or modified) for each item that is built.

When I read this article, it sounded eerily familiar. Traditional IT approaches require a long lead time in terms of design, development, change management and deployment to bring a new application to life. The ultimate purpose of the application is to provide business functionality. If it were possible to build low cost prototypes, or even better, build and retire functionality it would be equivalent to the “additive manufacturing” phenomenon in manufacturing.

Of course, in IT we have the cloud based approach to pay-per-use infrastructure (IaaS). We have pay-per-use functionality in terms of hosted applications (SaaS). We also have pay-per-use platforms for hosting complex applications (PaaS). In this context manufacturing appears to have found its own “Cloud” and the advantages stemming from this change will be nothing short of world changing.

NOTE: All credit for the opinion piece on 3D Manufacturing are given to The Economist.

There is no “Cloud” in Cloud Computing

2011-03-06T17:54:00.000-08:00

Last year Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO) had an outburst about the entire buzz regarding “the cloud”. He was amused with the cloud being seen as a new technology that was going to change the world of IT as we see it. One year later, his comments that Cloud is not a new technology, simply a new business model for delivering more of the same continue to hold true. This 3 minute video is worth watching from the 2:15 mark onwards.

In my discussions with business (not IT) leaders, the cloud continues to be seen as a new technology that eliminates in-house IT. The fact that cloud computing is a new model of delivery, NOT a new technology is overlooked. Although, cloud has many advantages the fundamental fact that it is a new way of doing more of the same needs to be repeatedly communicated. Cloud is a business enabler, not a business changing proposition. New revenue channels will need to be based on innovative ideas, simply moving to the cloud is not going to bring new business.

Resurgence of Enterprise Architecture

2011-01-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

The current IT landscape has several new emerging trends and technologies. Many of these have progressed beyond the hype-cycle and have moved into implementation mode. In the near-term the following technologies are playing out within the business/technology realm. A detailed map of these emerging technology areas and corresponding technology clusters is provided in Capgemini’s TechnoVision.

All of these technologies provide valuable solutions to current business issues. However, these benefits are multiplied when they are used in conjunction with each other. For example: Using a SaaS based approach for managing Sales is good (Think SalesForce.com). However, if the Sales functions were integrated with the back-end Financial systems in real-time using a SOA based approach; it would provide for much deeper insight in terms of forecasting and budgeting.

The expertise in stitching together new technologies meaningfully has always been a challenge. Enterprise Architects (EA) have been responsible for serving as the bridge between IT and business. Translating business strategy into applications and IT functions that meet those goals. With this new array of emerging technology, and the high-level of overlap between different technology areas, the role of the EA has become even more vital to an organization. The Enterprise Architect role has now extended from not only being the business-IT bridge, but also being the thought leader for an organization. The EA is now responsible for evaluating technology trends and incorporating the right mix of emerging technologies to meet strategic goals. The “mixing” part of an EA’s responsibility is something that has fundamentally changed.

SOA Composite for the New Year

2010-12-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

For those of us who think in terms of "components", the SOA composite below sums up good wishes for the new year. Wishing you a fabulous 2011.

History repeats itself... internet to cloud

2010-12-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

When the internet moved beyond the hotmail phenomenon and become a serious contender in enterprise computing; there was the usual media hype about end of IT departments and the imminent move to internet based services. After almost two decades of enterprise grade internet applications, IT departments continue to run certain sets of applications while some applications have moved to the internet.

The value of in-house IT to maintain and run vital business processes was apparent with core applications being maintained in-house. These core applications moved from a client-server to an internet delivery model, but the "network computer" (although a great concept) never really took off. At the same time, internet based functionality provided a completely new level of access to applications, and created entirely new models of business and gave rise to yet unseen businesses (Ex: Webex)

Ultimately the internet was embraced by the enterprise where an appropriate blend of "intranet" and "internet" functions continue to co-exist.

In the cloud arena, similar hype is currently being played out. The end of enterprise IT is trumpeted by popular channels, with an "Everything-as-a-Service" model being proposed as the end-game. These propositions are similar to what the internet went through, and if history holds true, we will eventually end up with a hybrid mix of private and public cloud models of delivery.

The public cloud clearly has value as long as it not used as simply a cost-cutting mechanism. The private cloud would host the enterprise jewels, which would be too precious to host in a public space.

Fusion Middleware design patterns

2010-12-02T11:58:00.000-08:00

With the recent release of Oracle FMW 11g, the perception of the product has moved from being a "good" integration platform to being a robust application development platform. A recent book that caught my attention was Oracle FMW Patterns by Harish Gaur / Markus Zirn.

The book is based on 10 use cases and provides interesting guidelines on FMW patterns. Will provide more feedback once I have had a chance to read it cover-to-cover.

Business value from the cloud – Process Machines

2010-11-22T06:23:00.001-08:00

Using the cloud as a Utility service has advantages. It enables computing on a pay-as-you-go-model. However, the advantages of Infrastructure/Platform are highly relevant to IT departments. From a business perspective this is still same old IT. The underlying delivery model may be different and the pricing may be attractive, but it does not bring any meaningful value to business operations, besides optimizing IT functions.

To make the Cloud relevant to the business, the pay-as-you go paradigm needs to be extended to business functionality. What if … business functionality could be enabled "on tap". A business function that currently needs to be designed and developed by the in-house IT team could instead be leveraged on-demand by a hosted provider of functionality.

In this scenario, the cloud becomes much more tangible to the business, as it provides the ability to enhance existing business processes, and use these enhancements on as as-needed basis. Of course, this concept applies equally to both private and public cloud environments. The granularity of the business function needs to be defined, but several industry examples are available:

Calculations based on federal standards that change regularly (Ex: FDA mandated formulae for calculating sugar content)

Widget functions that are regularly used (Ex: Geo mapping capability)

Complex but static business functions (Ex: Tax filing)

The ability to leverage functionality in a cloud based model is enabled by using a SOA based infrastructure in the cloud. The process/function is the utility that is made available. The infrastructure / platform are irrelevant from a functionality perspective. These pieces of functionality aka: PROCESS MACHINES are created as virtual images and are then deployed as one holistic unit. The diagram below lays out the concept and deployment model for these process machines:

Own / Lease / Taxi … Zip Car

2010-11-22T05:47:00.001-08:00

Defining the utility computing model and explaining various layers and types of clouds has been an industry staple for a while. Attempts to define the cloud have been many, and they have been memorialized in the NIST definition as reproduced below:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

A conceptual model for the cloud layers is as follows:

The definitions and descriptions although accurate and complete fail to provide a sense of realism. I was recently asked to make the cloud "real" for a group of business leaders and chose the metaphor approach to explain the cloud. In doing so I ended up extending the metaphor and stumbling upon a concept that can potentially further drive cloud adoption. The metaphor I used was the classic car-based analogy.

We start with the traditional ownership model where you outright purchase a car. You own the vehicle, and can choose the color, the trim and the accessories. The car costs you the same whether you keep it in the garage or drive it 12 hours a day. You are also responsible for the maintenance and insurance for the vehicle.

This is the on-premise model for traditional software, where-in you own the software, can modify it as you please and are also responsible for the maintenance of the software.

A more recent model for software delivery has been the hosted model. This is similar to leasing a car. You own the vehicle, can accessorize it within limits, and can drive it when and where you please. The maintenance of the vehicle is not your responsibility. However you are limited to how much change you can make to the vehicle. For ex: You cannot change the color or add additional trim to the vehicle.

This model reduces the amount of ownership you have for the software, but it also lowers the maintenance overhead. As a business you start leveraging the software for the business function it offers without having to get overly involved in the maintenance of the application.

If the intent is simply to get from place A to place B and you do not care about what you drive and how the ride feels then using a taxi is an ideal solution. You use the taxi to get where you want. You pay for the time that you use the taxi, and have no ownership and no maintenance overhead. This is the cloud model for service delivery.

Granular pieces of functionality are leveraged on demand, and you pay for what you use. This is a highly efficient model for leveraging specific business functionality. There is no ownership and no maintenance overhead. Also you get what is delivered, and have no control over the structure of the services, and have to adapt your business processes to accommodate these services.

What if…. You liked the on-demand model of the cloud, the pay-as-you go convenience of the cloud, but still wanted the ability to customize your experience. Essentially you wanted a taxi, BUT wanted to choose the model of the taxi… AND you wanted to drive it. You wanted all of this for short periods of time and did not want to have any of the liabilities that come with ownership. This is possible, and in the "car" analogy is provided by the Zip car providers in major metro cities.

This confluence of pay-as-you-go with the flexibility of limited ownership is provided by layering a SOA based approach in a cloud environment. This approach provides for a pre-built process on the cloud that can be further orchestrated to work with existing business processes.

Mental Note - Cloud Examples

2010-02-17T06:47:00.001-08:00

Type	Acronym	Example
Infrastructure as a Service	IaaS	Amazon - EC2
Platform as a Service	PaaS	Salesforce - Force.com
Software as a Service	SaaS	Google – Google Apps

Credit: Aaron Levie – CEO Box.net (link)

SOA Governance and AmberPoint

2010-02-16T14:24:00.000-08:00

The tools and skill sets required in designing a SOA based system, are quite different from maintaining the same system once it is operational. This is different from traditional systems where the skills and tools to develop and maintain an application remain the same.

A SOA based system interacts with multiple applications and crosses multiple middle ware platforms. Tracing a transaction from source to destination is complicated. It is especially opaque when a transaction does not complete, and it needs to be traced to the point of failure.

Embedding "hooks" within the SOA code to help troubleshoot transactions is one approach, albeit expensive in terms of coding and maintenance. Several error handling frameworks have been developed to overcome this fundamental complexity of a SOA-based system.

Oracle's acquisition of AmberPoint is a good step forward in providing a comprehensive tool based approach to SOA Governance. It would be ideal if the tool is left as a stand-alone option without getting embedded into the Oracle Enterprise Manager product suite. A good UI with a solid set of well documented API's would go a long way in reducing the maintenance overhead if an operational SOA system.

Alliances in the Cloud

2010-02-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

The cloud based approach necessitates a partnered approach.It is difficult for a single provider to have the breadth and depth of expertise across all cloud layers (infrastructure / software / functionality) to provide a meaningful service offering.

The 2 teaming agreements in the last couple of days highlights this approach:

Fujitsu + Canon - Provides a cloud based print offering.

Fujitsu + MindTouch - Provides a cloud based scanning solution

The rapid pace at which service providers are partnering to provide best-of-breed offering adds credence to the value that cloud computing provides.

Why Larry hates the term "cloud"

2010-01-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

Larry Ellison is hilarious in this clip from his address to the Churchill Club. The key take away is the comment: "Our industry is so bizarre, they change a term and they think they have invented technology."

In Larry's opinion network computing is back and now instead of being called "SaaS" or "On Demand", it is called cloud.

Fusion Applications - Concerns related to IP

2009-12-24T16:12:00.001-08:00

MB Technologies makes Bindows, a toolkit which provides a windows look and feel. This was licensed by Hyperion prior to its acquisition by Oracle. There appears to be a dispute in terms of licensing agreements between Oracle and MB Technologies, as Oracle is using this technology as a part of Fusion Applications.

This indicates that parts of Fusion Applications will have a windows look and feel. It also may point to potential future issues with licensing terms with OEM's whose products have been implicitly licensed prior to being acquired by Oracle.

Source Link: Oracle Slapped With Suit Tied to Fusion Applications - PCWorld Business Center by Chris Kanarcus.

Posted using ShareThis

Cloud Computing vs. SaaS

2009-12-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

At first blush cloud computing does not seem to be different from Software as a Service (SaaS). Both provide hosted capability and a pay-per-use model. The following 1 minute video rPath demystifies a bunch of terms related to cloud computing, including "grid computing", "platform as a service" and "utility computing".

The analogy of a fully-owned car (On-premise), a leased car (SaaS) and a Taxi (Clod Computing) is helpful, and is explained well in the following video, courtesy of GoGrid.

While the definition of cloud computing continues to evolve, in essence you could use Cloud computing in 3 ways:

Infrastructure as a Service - Think disk space, similar to Amazon's EC2.
Platform as a Service - This is the evolving space. Here you have a server+Infrastructure available as a service.
Application as a Service - Think Salesforce.com, however this is pay-per use, NOT pay-per-user.

The following diagrams illustrate this concept:

The ability to "plug-in" and pay-per-use of IT capability is ultimately quite compelling.

Media interview at OOW - 2009

2009-11-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

Happened to stumble across this clip taken at OOW-2009. Surprising what makes its way onto YouTube.

209 ways to share

2009-11-18T06:02:00.000-08:00

I was recently looking for a quick tool to share interesting information on this blog. I (rightly) assumed that there must be a tool for this. I stumbled upon "Share this" and "add this" as useful tools. However, I was surprised at the number of options available to share information. I am familiar with the usual suspects namely "Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Blogger and Stumble", however was amazed to see a total of 209 ways of sharing.

Social media and social networking seem to have not only come of age, but appear to be extremely vibrant at this point. A screen shot of all the options that I have come across is shown below:

Microsoft / SAP alliance... Enemy of my enemy is my friend

2009-11-18T05:45:00.001-08:00

Microsoft and SAP to announce going to market jointly in the Financial planning, budgeting and forecasting space. Microsoft will refer SAP as a preferred vendor in the financial planning domain and both will work closely to make their products work better together.

This sounds like a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Details of the press release are here.

OOW 2009 – A serious event

2009-10-23T05:42:00.001-07:00

This Oracle Open World (2009), was a much more serious event compared to previous events. Although the crowd size felt the same, the quality of attendees was different. There appeared to be more decision makers, and most attendees had a sense of purpose and were focused on finding out information relevant to their area of interest. Conversations with attendees were more engaged and detailed and you came away with a sense of having had a serious discussion, versus water-cooler talk.

This may have been a direct consequence of the economy, as everyone's expense budgets are limited, and only those who had a quantifiable reason to be at OOW were approved to come. Another incidental observation was that there were no freebies this time around. No stress balls, blinking pens, giveaway toys and the like… definitely a serious event.

The embarrassingly fast Exadata V2

2009-10-23T05:14:00.001-07:00

The big announcement in Larry's keynote this year was about Exadata V2. It is fast… and Larry drove the point home by challenging anyone who ran applications on IBM servers to make those applications run half as fast as on the Exadata V2 servers. Brash, in your face and completely Larry-style. The high-level specs are as follows:

400 GB DRAM (Very Nice)
5 TB flash cache memory (Awesome)
336 TB disk space (Nice)
40 GB InfiniBand network links (Good)
880 Gbps throughput (Very nice)
1,000,000 random I/O's / second / rack (Awesome)
64 cores
1/6^th power consumption of equivalents (Very Compelling, if true)

In layman's terms, with the huge amount of memory most of the database would reside in fast-processing memory. This has significant gains in terms of performance and power consumption. With disk I/O being extremely fast as well, any data that does reside on disk would be rapidly accessible.

Bottom-line – Looks, sounds and smells like an extremely fast machine. Would keep a close eye on which applications and versions within the Oracle Universe start getting certified on it.

Oracle Support – from service ticket to community based support

2009-10-21T09:08:00.001-07:00

Oracle has invested heavily in the MySupport service portal. The vision is to have a community based support mechanism, and use data mining techniques to provide proactive support. With over $1Bn dollars invested by Oracle in the support platform and over 50% of revenue coming from maintenance contracts, this is a big area of focus and innovation for Oracle.

At the highest level the MySupport process works as follows:

Register servers and Oracle products with Oracle MySupport. This provides instant visibility to Oracle regarding your configurations.
Use community based model for researching issues and providing feedback. This includes feedback on patches.
Use the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) to review patches that are applicable to your environment, research dependencies and apply patches.
Oracle would monitor bugs/defects based on information being fed into the system by all customers, detect trends and proactively advise on patches that are relevant to your environment.

The benefit here is that you can leverage the extensive community based framework for issue resolution, and potentially derive benefits from proactive guidance. The downside is that you would need to exclusively embrace this model of support as it would not integrate with a service ticket model that you may already have in place.

It is all about the Edge

2009-10-20T17:45:00.001-07:00

It has been evident for a while that the ERP market place is saturated, with a diminishing number of new licenses being sold by the major ERP vendors. However, the focus on "Edge" products at OOW – 2009, indicates just how far down this path the market has moved. Almost all discussions with Oracle representatives were focused on "Edge" products and/or industry alignment. These "Edge" products are by definition intended to augment core ERP applications, by providing niche functionality. These edge products, however have now matured to the point where they can provide stand-alone functionality besides supplementing the primary ERP. The most buzz at OOW was around the following edge products:

Hyperion
OBIEE and EPM
Oracle Transportation Management
Demantra
Master Data Management

The underlying infrastructure and integration with these products was considered implicit to the solution. The focus was primarily on the value proposition or solution that could be achieved using these tools.

Fusion Applications – A very quiet release

2009-10-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

Larry Ellison's launch of Fusion Applications was so subtle it went quite unnoticed under the back drop of the Exadata V2 announcement. Fusion Applications has been in the gestation period for so long, that we all expected its release to be trumpeted across all channels and be a marquee event for OOW – 2009. Instead it qualified as the fourth bullet on Larry Ellison's keynote. Oracle must be down playing this release for strategic reasons, as it was obvious that a tremendous amount of work has been put into this product. With a data model consisting of 6534 tables and 18,385 views it has the makings of an enterprise class ERP. Some of the salient features are:

Fusion application is designed to extend existing "legacy" applications (EBS/PS/JDE) with bolt-on processes
Net-new functionality provided with new apps modules
High focus on quality with 700+ beta customers
Immense focus on usability, with roles based dashboards
Web 2.0 and social networking features embedded within the application
Built for on-premise or SaaS or a hybrid model
Built from the ground up around a MDM based data model, with a standardized model for defining business objects such as customer/item, etc.

Since the NDA's have loosened some of the initial screen shots have been released. They look like OBIEE screens, which is not surprising as the UI for Fusion Apps was meant to be BI based. Some of the screens are shown below:

AIA 2.5 - From A2A to Cross-Industry Integration

2009-10-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

AIA started out being a mechanism for application-to-application (A2A) integration. With the release of AIA 2.5 the the AIA Foundation Pack now has 80 EBO's and over a 1000 pre-built services. With over 30 PIP's AIA has matured to being a cross-industry integration platform by providing pre-built process flows for common cross-industry processes such as Order to Cash (O2C) and Procure to Pay (P2P). NOTE: All of these pre-built processes are based on specific application end-points. However these process flows which are embedded within the existing framkwork and can be (relatively) easily extended to include different application endpoints.

I anticipate future release of AIA would focus on specific industries and provide process flows for business processes specific to an industry domain. This would align well with the gradual release of Fusion Applications.

With the initial release of AIA in April-2007 to the release of AIA 2.5 in Oct 2009, AIA has matured from a great concept with a lose set of code artifacts, to a robust product with a compelling value proposition as an integration platform. Quite a journey in 2.5 years.

Removing namespace from XML payload

2008-12-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

Namespace errors sometimes tend to take an immense amount of time to solve. Extracting content from the payload without the namespace dependencies can be useful for troubleshooting.

The blog posting found here has a solution for this. All credits to the post creator.

In BPEL the "ora:getContentAsString function cane be used. In OSB the XQuery function "strip-namespace" needs to be used.

OZONE Innovation lab

2008-11-19T15:35:00.000-08:00

Wipro announced the launch of the OZONE lab for innovation in conjunction with Oracle. It will focus on AIA based solutions, as well as industry specific solutions for their clients. This shows a major committment to AIA and the extent to which it is being used to provide industry specific process solutions.

The press release from Oracle is available here.

Apples from Google to taste better

2008-11-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

At the recently concluded Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco there was an interesting panel discssion on "Cloud: The Apps". The panel consisted of Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO) and Dave Girouard (President of Google's Enterprise Unit). The context to the discussion was that major ERP players such as Oracle and SAP were not going to survive in the SaaS based model of the future. The discussion revolved around the fact that the entrenched ERP players were late to the Web2.0 game, and would lose market share with the adoption of SaaS based application models.

Marc Benioff, as expected, slammed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about his dismissive comments on Web 2.0. He proclaimed Larry's comments to be a sign of weakness, by invoking the chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in stating "When weak, feign strength".

Dave Girourd explained the disconnect between traditional applications that focused on the business process while giving little attention to the end-user interaction. He saw the new Web2.0 applications essenitially providing a new paraidigm to productivity by focusing primarily on the presentation and interaction layers. He pointed out Microsoft's recent announcement of its Azure Web application development platform and the web-hosted version of MS Office as good starting points. However comparing the Google Apps collaboration suite with hosted MS Office, he said it was like comparing "apples to oranges". He stated then when the hosted version of MS office becomes available it will be possible to compare it to Google Apps, and went on to say that it would be clear that "Google's apples will taste better".

OOW 2008 Theme - Complete, Open, Integrated

2008-10-13T05:30:00.000-07:00

The main theme of the OOW 2008 event was Complete, Open, Integrated. Although the buzz words sound great, one had to dig a little deeper to get Oracle's vision around this key theme.
My understanding is as follows:
Complete - Oracle now has 3000 applications in its inventory. The vision of complete is to have one vendor that provides best-of-breed functionality, but more importantly controls the components within those acquired applications that bring unique value. This enables the ability to leverage functionality across Oracle's entire suite of products. This direction, in the form of pre-built integration points (hooks), is apparent in the new tool sets and new functionality within existing product sets that are becoming available.

Open - The usual connotation of open implying "Open Source" (ex: Apache, Python, etc.) does not apply to Oracle's context of "Open". In The Oracle context each application or product suite has a well defined set of interaction points, which can be invoked using an open standard (ex: SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc.) The applications are not built using open source tools, but the integration mechansisms are standardized using open source standards. Oracle is also providing hooks for its development environments (IDE) to use open development tools such as Eclipse. In essesnce Oracle has its own definition for "Open".

Integrated - This is a necessity for Oracle. The vision here is that organizations have a complex application foot-print, for several good reasons. Oracle's approach is to not necessarily replace applications, but provide a product to tie applications together in a standards-based approach. This is essentially the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) message from OOW 2007, which has been repurposed as part of a larger theme.

Bottom Line: The Complete and Open message is a consequence of the large number of acquistions. The Integrated message is a necessity. There is a dichotomy in the Open and Integrated message. On the one hand Oracle is pushing the "Open and Standards based" message to encourage partners to build niche solutions. But with the "Integrated" message Oracle is telegraphing its intent to provide out-of-the-box integration, and as Charles Phillips puts it "Eliminate the need for consultants to integrate your applications".

OOW 2008 - Application Integration Architecture

2008-10-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

AIA seems to have become integral to many of the offerings from Oracle. It is now assumed that AIA is the integration mechanism across all product stacks, unless stated otherwise. This was quite surprising, since the AIA product suite itself has matured only in the last 6 months. It shows the surprising rapidness with which Oracle has internally embraced the AIA message. This space will continue to grow rapidly, as Oracle continues to use AIA internally and continues to roll out newer (and enriched) versions of the Foundation Pack.

The interesting new development in this space, was the newly announced approach to start building composite (stand-alone) applications using AIA. This is a different direction for AIA, as it takes the AIA Suite out of the integration realm and into the broader domain of composite application development. This would have been the eventual evolution of the product suite, but it seems to have already started moving in that direction.

The implication here is that new applications can be developed which implicitly integrate functionality from disparate systems. With this approach AIA moves from simply being a stack of "pipes" to becoming a "jacuzzi" (or sewage pump, or flush tank, or... you get my point). It has moved from being the plumbing to a usable end-application.

On a side note, I would not be surprised if AIA was rebranded in the near future. AIA is not really an architecture (more like a framework), it has grown beyond simply being an integration platform, and is not meant simply to connect two major application suites. Although all of the above were true when AIA originally came out, it has evolved from "plumber's putty" to now being applicable to a whole host of new areas and would be more aptly characterized by its likeness to "Gorilla glue" (pun intended).

OOW 2008 - Industry focus

2008-10-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

Healthcare continues to a be an area of focus for Oracle. Charles Phillips announced creation of the Healthcare Global Business Unit (GBU) which implies a huge international foucs in this domain. The message to techies is start reading up on HL7, it will be a "very very nice to have" in the near future.

Also interesting was the announcements of the 2 new acquisitions of AdminServer and Skywire. Although the acquisitions had already been announced in June-08, the fact that they were highlighted in key note sessions shows their importance to Oracle. Both these applications help employers manage insurance related functionality. This is a new area for Oracle and may be part of a larger attempt to provide and outsourced business administration service such as workday.com

Applications Unlimited and Fusion Applications

2008-10-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

Nothing new in this, except for a reaffirmation that all ERP application suites will be indefinitely supported. I guess there must still be Oracle customers who need to hear this message every morning, to reaffirm their faith in Oracle and not call 1.800.872.1727.

The strategy for Fusion Applications seems to be more focused towards leveraging the latest in Web 2.0 and BI technologies. The core functionality would be based on an AIA framework. The vision to use end-user friendly products is appealing.

Also it was not surprising to hear that Fusion applications would be available both on premise and in a hosted model. What was surprising was to hear that it would also be available in "any combination" of models. This points to a radically different delivery model for a major ERP suite.

BEA's impact on Fusion Middleware

2008-10-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

Components of BEA will be morphed into the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite. The strategic direction for each product line and the overlapping functionality has been made clear by Oracle (subject of a separate post).

The relevant points of interest are
1. Oracle ESB will become Oracle Service Bus. implying in techie terms that Oracle ESB is dead... long live BEA Aqualogic.
2. Oracle Java Machine is also dead... long live BEA JRockit.
3. OC4J is over... BEA J2EE Container comes out the winner.
4. Oracle Services Repository will be replaced by Aqualogic Enterprise Repository.

The major component that carries over from Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle BPEL.

CEP and EDA replace SOA as buzz word

2008-10-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

SOA is no longer as major a buzz word as it used to be, although the concept is now well adopted and is intrinsic in most of the newer releases of Oracle products.

The newer buzz words in the SOA domain are EDA (Event Driven Architecture) and CEP (Complex Event Processing). Both of these terms are finer aspects of SOA and focus on managing and monitoring the triggering points in a SOA environment.

The Oracle Complex Event Processing and Oracle WebLogic Event Server are products in this space.

Cloud computing with Amazon

2008-10-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

For those new to the concept of cloud computing, it is similar to the concept of leveraging disparate functionality in a SOA environment. However, in this case the Oracle Database and Middleware products are hosted by Amazon, and the database and middleware functionality can be leveraged as a service. (A picture would explain this better... future post). Lookup EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and AMI (Amazon Machine Images) for more information.

These are powerful new development in this uber-geek domain. What it does mean is that databases are being commoditized and you could essentially use a database in the same way as you use a telephone. Sounds surreal... so did SOA 4 years ago.

Footnote: Don't imagine these clouds to be white and fluffy... darkish grey and Amazon-shaped would be more appropriate.

Oracle Beehive

2008-10-13T05:02:00.000-07:00

This was a new product suite announced during OOW. This is a reworked version of the Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle's "Enterprise 2.0" offering.

This suite consists of 2 sets of functionality:
1. Communication tools such as email/voice mail/chat
2. Coordination tools such as Calendaring and document sharing.

With the number of bees painted on the sidewalks around the convention center, it was obvious that Oracle was strongly pushing this new product suite.

The combination of Oracle Web Center, Beehive and Oracle Content Management is Oracle's answer to Enterprise 2.0. It will be interesting to watch how Oracle integrates this pseudo-social networking tool into the enterprise.

Application Grid

2008-10-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

The concept behind the application grid is to provide a virtualized in-memory data layer which can be accessed by any application. This has significant impact in improving performance and de-coupling physical data from applications.

The application grid is labeled Weblogic Application Grid and is a combination of Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid), Oracle JRockit (Java Virtual Machine) and Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The application grid is to the database, as AIA is to SOA. This is a space to watch out for, as the concept is still nascent, but would have huge impact on future application design.

Note: This is really an application layer product, and is different from the database grid product suite which is implicit in all Oracle databases.

The new BI... Hyperion and EPM

2008-10-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

Last year OBIEE was the only Oracle BI offering. With the acquisition of Hyperion there is a whole new product suite and toolset that Oracle is now part of the Oracle ecosystem. There is overlapping functionality between these major product suites and this has caused the BI space to become less clear.

The Enterprise Performance Workspace (a Hyperion product) may eventually replace the OBIEE dashboard functionality. The SmartView offering in this same space is intriguing as it provides integration with MS Office products. Expect more confusion before the dust settles in this area.

The Essbase database appears to be the clear front runner in the OLAP space. It will eventually become the tool of choice for OLAP processing and OLAP based applications.

Oracle as a hardware vendor

2008-10-13T04:37:00.000-07:00

This topic has been written about ad-nauseum since Larry Ellison made the announcement on 9/24/08. The large "X" that hinted about this throughout the venue added to the buzz. Here is a very brief recap:
1. Oracle Exadata - A specialized storage device that returns query results, rather than data blocks to the database server
2. HP-Oracle Database Machine - A VERY big (64-CPU) database server, offered in conjunction with the above mentioned storage option.

For large terabyte sized datawarehouses, this is a compelling value proposition. We should expect the hardware offerings to be scaled down over time to serve the small-to-medium business segment. The macro effects of this hardware play by Oracle will be far reaching.

Metalink becomes MySupport

2008-10-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

The new support website (although the link remains metalink.oracle.com) is revolutionary. Instead of being a static search based content provider, it now recognizes the systems that you have based on your CSI, and provides analysis of these systems. You do need to switch on these features on the host system, which incidentally are switched on by default.

More importantly The UI is dramatically different, with a portal based look and feel. The ability to add portlets of content specific to your needs is very useful. This new website shows how content searching should be.

AIA PIP's and Application compatibility

2008-04-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

The AIA Foundation Pack (FP) 2.0.1 was released in mid-March 2008. There have been a number of PIP's that existed prior to this release of AIA FP 2.0.1. There are PIP's based on this release of AIA and of course a large number planned to be released on future releases of AIA.

It is important to note that the PIP's provide generic process integration functionality between major application suites, but these PIP's have specific application version compatibility implications. For example the popular Siebel CRM to Oracle EBS PIP which integrates the Quote to Order process flow was available as part of AIA 1.0. This PIP was certified for EBS 11i.10.2 and Siebel 7.8. The newer version of this PIP (built on FP 2.0.1) will, provide the same functionality but will be compatible with Siebel 8.0 and EBS 12.1. This leaves users of EBS Release 12.0 (12.0.1 through 12.0.4) without AIA certified PIP's for integration with Siebel.

There is a difference between certified and workable. Although, the older versions of the PIP can be retrofitted to work with EBS 12.0, it will not be explicitly certified or supported by Oracle. This does leave gaps in the AIA based PIP's that are certified for specific applications. It would be important to get specifics on the application version that are supported when deciding on the integration framework.

COLLABORATE 2008 - Complete, Open, INTEGRATED

2008-04-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

The COLLABORATE 2008 in Denver lived up to its expectation of being a great networking and educational event. The sessions ranging from "Using Rich components in ADF" to "From OCP to CIO" covered a wide array of topics. It was also interesting to listen to the speech by Eric Burton on "How to get Volunteers" during the OAUG SIG coordinator luncheon.

Charles Phillips keynote speech centered around the key points of Complete, Open and Integrated.

Complete in terms of breadth of technology ie: Database, Middleware and Application, as well as breadth of functionality offered by the Oracle ERP packages.

Open in terms of the standards used and the ability to extend the applications.

In the "Integrated" space Charles Phillips detailed the Application Integration Technology (AIA) offering and explained how it formed the foundation for Oracle's integration initiatives. This area will receive renewed attention as a result of the announcements made at COLLABORATE 2008
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AIA versus SAP's Business ByDesign

2008-04-08T18:43:00.001-07:00

There has been a tendency to try and equate SAP's Business ByDesign with Oracle's AIA offering. This is an unequal comparison as the two offerings are fundamentally different.

SAP's Business ByDesign is a SaaS based on demand offering for the SMB market. With this offering SAP provides a pre-built set of business processes built on a base of 2100 web services. The functionality that is provided is supported by SAP, and cannot be customized.

Oracle's AIA offering is a platform for integration and extension. It provides a set of pre-built integration solutions (PIP's), and the platform can also be used to build extensions and customizations. This offering is not targeted for a specific market segment.

The only common feature in these two offerings is that they are based on a SOA framework.

AIA and Intellectual Property (IP)

2008-04-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

AIA provides Oracle partners the ability to build out extensions to core ERP. This raises the question of ownership of IP. Oracle has built out 3 models for AIA based development with corresponding IP implications:

Co-development: This is an invitation only model wherein Oracle will invite partners who have deep vertical expertise, to co-develop with Oracle. This model helps Oracle leverage the deep vertical expertise provided by a partner. The partner gets exclusive marketing rights to this co-developed functionality as well as the opportunity to build out a skill base in AIA. IP is owned by Oracle
Oracle Certified extensions: A partner would build out functionality based on the Oracle AIA framework. They would go through a certification process with Oracle. A certified offering would be co-marketed with Oracle. Oracle would own the IP and the solution would be eventually supported by Oracle.
Partner/SI owned solution: A partner would build out a solution on an AIA based framework. The solution would be owned and maintained by the partner. Partner owns the IP.

PIP as a starter-kit

2008-04-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

The Process Integration Pack's (PIP's) that Oracle currently provides are built on the AIA Foundation Pack and are essentially aimed at building out end-to-end process flows across major Oracle product suites. This is partly a necessity based on Oracle's acquisition strategy. By creating the AIA framework Oracle has created an extensible integration/extension platform that it uses internally to stitch together process flows, and at the same time provide an extension platform for the wider partner community.

The current Oracle supplied PIP's create flows such as quoting in Siebel integrated to ordering in Oracle EBS. These PIP's essentially are a "starter-kit" providing base integration between major product suites. These PIP's will essentially be extended to fill out industry specific needs. The Oracle supplied PIP's provide an Oracle supported jump-start to integrating Oracle suites and providing end-to-end business process flows.

Extending Oracle ERP using AIA

2008-04-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

The Oracle AIA offering fundamentally changes the manner in which functionality within the Oracle ERP Suites (Oracle EBS/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards) can be extended. It also provides a new mechanism for integrating with these ERP Suites.

Traditionally any extensions built to an Oracle ERP Suite, to support non-standard functionality were tagged as bespoke customizations. These were clearly not supported by Oracle and required the creating organization and/or vendor to support the customization. Upgrades to the core ERP got particularly complex in environments having extensive customizations, since these customizations had to be retrofitted for the new version of the ERP. Organizations did not proceed down the path out of choice. Their unique business processes gave them little choice other than to customize the "canned" functionality.

The Oracle AIA offering provides an Oracle supported platform to build extensions to the core Oracle ERP. AIA provides a framework that is supported and enhanced by Oracle. Using this framework and the defined design principles; extensions can be built to the core ERP to support unique business processes. These unique extensions would continue to be functional across upgrades and future releases of the core ERP. Essentially Oracle would continue to support the extension framework, and extensions built on this framework would in-turn be supported without requiring extensive rework.

With the AIA platform Oracle has created an "application" for integration and extensions.

The AIA platform also opens up a new ecosystem for ISV's and SI's to build extensions to core ERP. These can be industry specific or could fill out niche gaps in the core ERP. The fact that they are built on AIA implies inherent standardization and reusability. A hosted model for more complex functionality is also possible.

The AIA based development model allows Oracle to significantly enhance the development of highly niche functionality by farming out development to a new channel of developers. This arrangement helps Oracle by creating an ecosystem that produces highly specific vertical functionality which Oracle does not have the bandwidth to build, and provides Oracle partners the ability to create industry specific differentiated verticals.

Old AIA new AIA

2008-04-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

The buzz around AIA has ben around since Oracle Open World (OOW) 2007. In fact during OOW 2007 there were about 10 PIP's that were announced. These were primarily built to integrate process flows within Siebel with other main line Oracle products such as Oracle E-Business Suite. However all of these "PIP's" were built using BPEL and had extensive installtion and configuration steps. They did not leverage the AIA Foundation pack which was essentailly still under development.

With the release of the AIA foundation pack in mid-March 2008, the ensuing PIP's are built on the using the true AIA framework. It is important to take this into account when deploying PIP's since the older generation PIP's are more complex to install and maintain.

The newer generation PIP's are extensible by leveraging the existing EBO's and EBS services.

BI or Portal front end to SOA applications

2008-04-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

The benefits of SOA based component applications has been widely discussed. Having built these applications using reusable web-services, the next iteration is presenting this functionality via a user-friendly front end.

There are two choices to this from an Oracle perspective. A portal based front end, or an OBIEE based dashboard that presents a graphical version of the raw data. It could also be a combination of both.

In either case an SOA implementation requires a presentation layer to provide a UI to the functionality and integration that has been created. The right choice of front end is crucial to end user acceptance. BI based dashboards, where applicable, are the most intuitive for end users. Portal functionality is useful when multiple data sources are being brought together.

With Web 2.0 functionality providing yet another choice, this area of discussion will continue to be an area of healthy debate

Web 2.0 and AIA

2008-03-31T18:00:00.000-07:00

Via multiple channels Oracle appears to have embraced Web 2.0. The integration of Web 2.0 functionality with core ERP suites and through a wider framework using AIA will be interesting to watch.

Oracle already seems to have taken a step towards integrating Oracle CRM (part of Oracle E-business Suite) with social networking sites, as well as with the Blackberry RIM platform. It would be very useful to have RSS feeds from an ERP transactional system that would create a "push" mechanism to traditional ERP systems.

There is mixed opinion about this release (as is the case with most software releases). In summary this is an exciting development with a lot of promise. Something to keep a close watch on. It has the potential to create an entire ecosystem of wedge applications.

Business Process Modeling Diagramming Options

2008-03-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

There are various business modeling diagramming options. The choice of the modeling notification depends on the level at which the modeling is being. Each notification model has its benefits and drawbacks.

The Value Added Chain Diagram (VACD) is best suited for level 0 and level 1 diagrams. The Business Process Modeling Notification (BPMN) and the Event Driven Process Chain (EPC) modeling is more suited for level 2 and lower diagrams, which are generally more inclined towards implementation code.

Oracle's BPA suite supports all 3 modeling options. The BPMN and EPC models are both interpreted by the BPA server and can be converted to the BPEL blueprint and eventually to the BPEL process flows.

IDS-Scheer is inherently geared towards EPC modeling, however the newer BPMN standard is recommended if you are using the Oracle BPA suite, especially if the final intent is to create executable BPEL code.

BPEL domains and OC4J

2008-03-25T04:42:00.001-07:00

The Oracle BPEL_PM is a java application that can be deployed in any J2EE container. In the case of Oracle Application server it is deployed in Oracle's OC4J (Oracle Container for Java) container.

The OC4J container is hosted on an Application server. It is similar to an instance of a database. It should be managed and administered as a physical object. Property settings for the OC4J container affect all applications deployed within that container.

The BPEL domain is a logical partition. BPEL domains are created for logically separating different business process flows. Domains could be used to delineate dev and test environments in a stable production environment. They could also be used to delineate along functional or business areas. Domain settings affect all process flows that are deployed within that domain.

There can be multiple domains within a BPEL_PM instance running in an OC4J container.

NFS settings for RAC

2008-03-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

Setting up RAC requires a shared disk architecture. Most of the documentation provided by Oracle provides a good sequence of steps to be followed to set up RAC and then to set up TAF (Transparent Application Failover). One of the issues that most first time implementers of RAC face is that the RAC instance does not start in spite of all the settings being correct.

This issue is not due to incorrect configuration of the RAC, but can usually be traced to missing settings in the shared disk mount point. One of the most common errors in NFS based shared systems is that not all the parameters have been correctly specified when the mount point is created. The NFS mount point must have the following parameters in a RAC environment:

cio,rw,bg,hard,nointr,proto=tcp,vers=3,noac,rsize=32768,
wsize=32768,timeo=600

Ensure that these settings are in place for a successful RAC implementation.

Hardware sizing for Oracle EBS

2008-03-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

Sizing hardware is always a challenge. The issue here is that production sized hardware usually needs to be procured even before the project has started. This is usually the case with organizations where Oracle and Oracle EBS is being installed for the first time. There is no prior version of the application, to benchmark against.

Most of the hardware vendors provide sizing spreadsheets that can be filled out, and a rough estimate of the computing power needed can be reached. This exercise usually helps in clarifying the SAN and disaster recovery architecture, but does not get to the specifics of the production hardware.

Each organization has unique access patterns and transaction patterns, and hence it is genuinely difficult to extrapolate hardware sizing between different organizations. The best approach is to procure the production database server (since this can usually be sized with a fair degree of accuracy) or the post-production development server. These can be used to start the implementation process, and once a certain level of organization specific configuration has bene completed, then production benchmarking can be accomplished.

There is some assistance available in the for of white papers and benchmarking for typical transaction loads. This link has a list of white papers on sizing for IBM, HP and Sun machines. This link provides detailed performance information for representative transaction loads.

When it comes to estimating the network bandwidth requirements the information is very scattered. There are no bench marks and thumb rules need to be applied. A usual CRM/imodule would have the same bandwidth requirements as a normal internet user. HOwever, power users, especially in the demand planning and forecasting space will require a higher bandwidth

Oracle AIA update

2008-01-20T09:16:00.000-08:00

The AIA framework should be available for general use in the next couple of weeks. In the interim the Communication pack is the most recent preview of an implemented PIP based on the AIA framework. Some of the existing PIP's such as the Siebel to Order Management PIP is mostly BPEL based and does not really leverage the AIA framework.

Install Oracle with your nose

2008-01-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

To counter claims by IBM that Oracle database is hard to install and takes over 50 hours, this inspired individual installed the Oracle database in 2 hours, using only his NOSE.

I would recommend seeing only the first and last minute of the video.

PeopleSoft CRM integration with Customer Hub

2008-01-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

Interesting announcement by Oracle about a BPEL based integration between PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 and Customer Data Hub. This makes PeopleSoft an attractive option for existing PeopleSoft customers who are considering CRM options. How this will play out w.r.t to Siebel CRM is to be seen. The article can be viewed here.

It would not be surprising if an AIA based integration between Siebel and PeopleSoft were to be announced soon.