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Wednesday December 19 2001 Oracle Speaks on Web Services Repositioning and Enterprise Applications With OpenWorld in early December, and AppsWorld to come in January, Oracle is at last breaking its silence on Web Services. Oracle's strategy has three components:
Conspicuous by their absence from the Web Services party, to date Oracle have been pushing a distinctly last-year message with Oracle9i AS, their J2EE application server, and their flagship Oracle9i database. The application architecture is the usual web browser client, application server, and database, but it has been taken to the limit, with Java clients, caching servers, firewall interoperability, and scaling and failover technology. Essentially, though, it's about the creation of one centralized data island, and enterprise application integration (EAI) is not addressed except with the suggestion that you migrate existing systems to a single instance of Oracle9i. That's good for Oracle's revenues, but it's not the most practical solution for companies happy with existing or legacy systems that need integration with newer services, or are looking to expand systems integration to trading partners. The Application Server Story Speed, manageability, and reliability - unbreakability in the latest adverts - are great propositions, but they don't hide the fact that Oracle has been lagging IBM and BEA in the application server market and that that is their major challenges in that market at the moment. From 1998 to 2000, Oracle's share of the application server market fell from 22% to 8%. In a market that quadrupled, their revenue grew by just 37% a year (source: IDC). That has been addressed in 2001, with Oracle releasing figures showing a 96% increase in revenue, to around $340m. But though that narrows the gap to the market leaders, it still puts Oracle at half the revenue of BEA, and 70% less than IBM. You get some idea of the reasons for this when you consider that, with the release in June 2001 of 9i AS, Oracle threw out its original application server and licensed technology from Orion (for developer discussion see, http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=7063). In consequence, Oracle has not chased leading edge technology, being busy enough making its application server speedy and unbreakable, getting compliance to the evolving J2EE standard, and providing tool support. That Oracle only joined the ebXML organisation at the end of October 2001 also backs this up. The recent release of Oracle9i JDeveloper release candidate and Oracle9i AS release 2.0 have robust support for programming and deploying Web Services (SOAP, WSDL to date and UDDI in the works) respectively. Even so, Oracle looks like a follower. Its aim seems to be to present mature tool support for technologies to its core customers, but its involvement in driving or supporting the standards from day one is limited when compared to IBM and Sun respectively. Technology leader or not, Oracle's practical support for Web Services standards shows that the market is maturing, that Oracle's core customers are clamoring for that functionality. But this isn't the only fight that Oracle is engaged in at present. The E-Business Suite Story I think Oracle's strategy is clearest when you look at Oracle 11i E-Business Suite - Oracle's enterprise application software suite. This consists of three key parts:
Oracle 11i is positioned against SAP, Siebel, and all the other best-of-breed enterprise applications, with the promise that its common data model and unified flows of information can link all the different parts of the enterprise. The debate is about who does the integration of the different systems, the enterprise or the software supplier. The choice, as Oracle sees it, is binary:
Oracle repeats, "Please don't customize Oracle 11i," to show its view that the decision is between those two extremes. It points to the experiences of some of the world's biggest enterprises to back this up (see http://www.oracle.com/customers/). Some Oracle 11i consultants don't take quite that radical a view, preferring instead to talk of a 'Christmas Tree' analogy. Everyone has the same basic Christmas tree, which they stand up and get straight, and then proceed to decorate with lights and baubles to make it their own. It's 80% Christmas tree, 20% decorations but the end result is unique. There is something more at stake, though, than an Internet rerun of the enterprise re-engineering efforts of the mid-90s. One of the questions that has been bothering me about the E-Business Suite is how it links companies together - whether as suppliers or customers. Linking Companies To date the user interface to Oracle 11i is browser-based, a portal to the information pertinent to you. The view on the business is thus the same if you're an employee, a customer or a partner - just the information you are allowed to view differs. Interactions like purchasing and requisitions can be automated to some extent - requests can be set in the browser to fire automatically at certain times, for example, ensuring the supply of sufficient coffee to your developers till the project finishes. Unfortunately, truly automated interactions between enterprises, where the workflows of each intersect, don't exist to date. At the Applications keynote at the UKOUG conference (11th December 2001), Jeremy Burton (Senior Vice President, Products and Services Marketing, Oracle) made the announcement that the next phase of E-Business Suite development is to expose the common data model using standards-based interfaces. This is great news. It's Oracle's pledge to make the data in Oracle 11i accessible as Web Services, using standard protocols and languages. The remaining piece of the puzzle is how to join the workflows of a SAP system, for example, with an Oracle 11i system as part of a trading agreement. The 'impedance mismatch' between the two schemas (that is, the way information is represented in the table) needs to be overcome to make this work. We're back to the problem of integrating heterogeneous systems, that we saw earlier, but at the level of inter-enterprise communications. This is where systems that exchange and route information come in - transforming XML information between two schemas using XSLT, and forwarding it to the trading partner. Oracle is positioning their Oracle9i Application Server release 2.0 to be the integration layer between enterprises. 9i AS supports SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, as we've seen, but it also adds support for Trading Partner Management (TPM) using RosettaNet and ebXML (http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/ias/docs/9ias_20_features.pdf). If the number of significant business schemas can be kept low, standard transformations will be possible between schemas. This ties in with Oracle's thinking that the enterprise application market will consolidate over the next year or so, with various blocs forming. IBM's stronger alliance with SAP and Microsoft's acquisition of Great Plains software all point to at least a three way split. Summary In summary, is Oracle right and IBM wrong? No, both are right, but the argument is one of scale. Oracle is right to say that enterprises should demand highly integrated enterprise applications that scale and work for the whole company, unifying all the parts of the business, or at the very least, not dividing them. IBM is right, though, to insist that data is distributed, and that systems are heterogeneous, between businesses. To link businesses requires standards-based interoperability that is flexible, for which the best option is Web Services. Acknowledgements for information in this article go to Jeremy Burton (Oracle) for his keynote on Oracle 11i at the UKOUG conference (http://www.ukoug2001.org/). Also to SYSAO (http://www.sysao.com/) for their demonstration and explanation of Oracle 11i. And Mark Sweeney from Parker Management Consultants, Ltd (http://www.pmcltd.com/) for the Christmas Tree analogy References
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