Oracle closes in on 'any'-ware with debut of middleware behemoth 11g suites family

After nearly a 20-month gestation period, Oracle today announced the arrival this month of the next generation of its sprawling middleware family, the long-anticipated Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Billed as a "complete, integrated, and hot-pluggable" middleware set of suites, the new software infrastructure offerings, which the Redwood Shores, Calif. computer giant previewed in November 2007, bolsters functionality, integration and business intelligence (BI) benefits across its vast product portfolio, including new capabilities for Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, Web Center Suite, and opening debut for Identity Management as a suite.

With the spoils of the BEA acquisition now fully baked into the mix -- and with anticipation for what the pending Sun Microsystems buy brings -- Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it "anyware."

The glaring missing link now, however, is the cloud element of Oracle's destiny. With such a broad infrastructure, data lifecycle, and apps/services development portfolio -- not to mention deep hooks into Oracle's burgeoning business applications offerings -- the only needed outcome to fulfill is the "any" in "anyware." That must include a fluid sourcing, hosting and business model future -- the nearly obvious Oracle Cloud.

Now that it's here, the 11g continental conglomeration must be the gateway for the enveloping 12c, as in "c" for cloud. You don't need to be an oracle to factor that clear and necessary path to the future.

Meanwhile, terrestrial Oracle also announced today that its middleware remains the company's fastest growing business with 90,000 customers worldwide, including 29 of the Dow Jones' top 30, 98 of Fortune's 100 Global, and 10 of the top 10 companies in major industries.

Enhancements across the platform of platforms in the Fusion Middleware 11g include:

• SOA Suite, a unifying system of human and document-centric processes and an event-driven architecture (EDA) with a complete range of SOA capabilities from development to security and governance. Deployed on the Oracle application grid infrastructure, the SOA underpinnings are optimized for building and integrating services on private and public clouds.
  
  
• WebLogic Suite (including WebLogic Server) adds new features, including Fusion Middleware GridLink for Real Application Clusters and Fusion Middleware Enterprise Grid Messaging. Fusion Middleware ActiveCache also enables rapid scale-out to meet changing user demand and system load.
  
  
• WebCenter Suite provides a broad set of reusable, out-of-the-box WebCenter Services components that can be plugged into any type of portal – intranet, composite application, Web-based community – to enhance social networking and personal productivity.
  
  
  • Composer, a declarative, browser-based tool, makes it easy for both end-users and developers to create, share, and personalize applications, portals and social sites.
    
    
  • WebCenter Spaces, a new pre-built social networking solution, enables end-user driven, created and managed communities (Group Spaces and Personal Spaces) to increase productivity, communication, and efficiency.
  
  
• Identity Management delivers the first components of a fully integrated Identity Management suite and features deeper integration with other Fusion Middleware solutions, as well as new features such as Deployment Accelerators, Universal Federation Framework, and a modern unified user interface based on Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces.

Fusion Middleware 11g also builds on the previously announced Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g strategic development tools including JDeveloper, Application Development Framework, and TopLink.

One of the key take-aways from 11g is the infusion of BI and analytics across the portfolio. That will also be a key of any cloud-based offerings from Oracle. Comprehensive BI as a service may very well be the killer application of cloud approaches.

Of the still standing middleware field -- IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, Red Hat/JBoss, Progress, TIBCO, SAP and Sybase -- only a few will be both able to get the "anyware" in terms of product breadth and of cloud delivery. [Disclosure: Progress and TIBCO and sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Oracle has sewn up its field brilliantly via its organic and aquisitions-fueled growth of the past decade. With Sun and its ID management, file system/directory, storage, Solaris community, and speedy silicon, the path to cloud seems inevitable and closer than most thought for Oracle. Incidentally, control of Java is more a strategic weapon than an enabler.

Oracle still needs more total governance (don't we all!), a PaaS play, and a whole lot of globally established and cutting edge, cloud-delivery data centers in place humming along. Oh, and the transition from a licensed to subscription commodity services business models won't be any much easier for Oracle than Microsoft. Has to be done, however.

But, as usual, Oracle will stride like the Rhodes Colossus the build, buy and partner spectrum of opportunity to attain a gobal cloud delivery capability. Nothing but the best will do, of course. Oracle has just about everything else in place, that's abundantly clear.

Oracle adds zest to SQL Developer with standalone data modeling tool, stirs the SQL market pot

Oracle has paved the way for developers to more easily build data models that create and update existing databases. The Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, which integrates with Oracle SQL Developer, arrived today as a standalone tool that supports logical, relational, multi-dimensional and data type modeling.

Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., had originally released a free version of the tool as an "early adopter" release. The full version is now available for $3,000 per named user. The new tool features multi-layered design and generation capabilities to produce conceptual entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) and transform them to relational models. Users can build, extend and modify a model as well as compare with existing designs.

The whole SQL databases and associated tools and modeling ecosystem is ripe for tumult. My best guess is that Oracle's pending Sun Microsystems purchase will provide offense via MySQL, and the associated community, to target the Microsoft SQL Server franchise.

Oracle can both keep tabs on the MySQL evolution while under-cutting Microsoft. Good work, if you can get it. Oh, and they can attract more middleware sales as they seduce the developers and deeply snare the operations folks.

On the other big future directon, to the cloud, modeling and managing data become the points of the arrow to attacting more sticky data into your cloud. We're ready seeing this in business process modeling as IBM is giving away such tools via BlueWorks. The enticement? To bring more process meta data and rules execution to Big Blue's cloud.

My expectation is that Oracle, HP, IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will begin to offer more "free" cloud-based enticements to enterprise developers and archirects that 1) hurt their competition whenever possible, and 2) solidify their respective advantages to create long-term cloud customers. Then repeat, extend, and solidify. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Remember when free and open source software began to disrupt the staus quo, and the large enterprise vendors could no longer ignore it? They played the same way. IBM, for example, embraced Linux (to hurt Microsoft and also sell more commodity hardware) and Apache web servers (ditto). But IBM did not open source DB2 or WebSphere.

We'll see the same picking and choosing -- tactical and strategic -- of what is "free" or not, cloud-based or not, rationalized on a similar pattern of combined offense and defense. The good news is that the enterprise architects and developers will have more good choices, lowering costs, and be able to play the beheamoths off of one another -- just like with open source.

Perhaps we need to call the cloud thing ... Any Source.

Back to Oracle and its maneuvers in the SQL space ... The capabilities of the new data modeler include:

• Visual entity relationship modeling, which supports both Barker and Bachman notations so developers can switch between models to suit the audience’s needs or create and save different visual displays
  
  
• Forwarding of engineering ERDs to relational models, transforming all rules and decisions made at the conceptual level to the relational model, where details are further refined and updated
  
  
• Separate relational and physical models that enable users to develop a single relational model for different database versions or different databases.
  
  
• A full spectrum of physical database definitions, supporting physical definitions such as partitions, roles, and tablespaces for specific database versions for multi-database, multi-vendor support

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is generally available today and can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

IT Financial Management solutions provide visibility into total operations to reduce IT costs

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Read a full transcript of the discussion.

The global economic downturn has accelerated the need to reduce total IT costs through better identification and elimination of wasteful operations and practices. At the same time, IT departments need to better create and implement streamlined processes for delivering new levels of productivity, along with reduced time to business value.

But you can't well fix what you can't well measure. And so the true cost -- and benefits -- of complex and often sprawling IT portfolios too often remain a mystery, shrouded by outdated and often manual IT tracking and inventory tasks.

New solutions have emerged, however, to quickly improve the financial performance of IT operations through automated measuring and monitoring of what goes on, and converting the information into standardized financial metrics. This helps IT organizations move toward an IT shared services approach, with more efficient charge-back and payment mechanisms.

Gaining real-time visibility into dynamic IT cost structures provides a powerful tool for reducing cost, while also maintaining and improving overall performance -- and perception of worth. Holistic visibility across an entire IT portfolio also develops the visual analytics that can help better probe for cost improvements and uncover waste -- and then easily share the analysis and decisions rationale with business leaders.

To better understand how improved financial management capabilities can help enterprise IT departments, I recently interviewed two executives from Hewlett-Packard Software and Solutions: Ken Cheney, director of product marketing for IT Financial Management, and John Wills, practice leader for the Business Intelligence Solutions Group.

Here are some excerpts:

Cheney: The landscape has changed in such a way that IT executives are being asked to be much more accountable about how they’re operating their business to drive down the cost of IT significantly. As such, they're having to put in place new processes and tools in order to effectively make those types of decisions. ... We can automate processes. We can drive the data that they need for effective decision-making. Then, there is also the will there in terms of the pressure to better control cost. IT spend these days composes about 2 to 12 percent of most organizations’ total revenue, a sizable component.

Wills: If all of your information is scattered around the IT organization and IT functions, and it’s difficult to get your arms around. You certainly can’t do a good job managing going forward. A lot of that has to do with being able to look back and to have historical data. Historical data is a prerequisite for knowing how to go forward and to look at a project’s cost and where you can optimize cost or take cost down and where you have risk in the organization. So, visibility is absolutely the key.

IT has spent probably the last 15 years taking tools and technologies out into the lines of business, helping people integrate their data, helping lines of business integrate their data, and answering business questions to help optimize, to capture more customers, reduce churn in certain industries, and to optimize cost. Now, it’s time for them to look inward and do that for themselves.

Cheney: IT operates in a very siloed manner, where the organization does not have a holistic view across all the activities. ... The reporting methods are growing up through these silos and, as such, the data tends to be worked within a manual process and tends to be error-prone. There's a tremendous amount of latency there.

The challenge for IT is how to develop a common set of processes that are driving data in a consistent manner that allows for effective control over the execution of the work going on in IT as well as the decision control, meaning the right kind of information that the executives can take action on.

Wills: When you look at any IT organization, you really see a lot of the cost is around people and around labor. But, then there is a set of physical assets -- servers, routers, all the physical assets that's involved in what IT does for the business. There is a financial component that cuts across both of those two major areas of spend. ... You have a functional part of the organization that manages the physical assets, a functional part that manages the people, manages the projects, and manages the operation. Each one of those has been maturing its capability operationally in terms of capturing their data over time.

Industry standards like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) have been driving IT organizations to mature. They have an opportunity, as they mature, to take advantage and take it to the next level of extracting that information, and then synthesizing it to make it more useful to drive and manage IT on an ongoing basis.

Cheney: IT traditionally has done a very good job communicating with the business in the language of IT. It can tell the business how much a server costs or how much a particular desktop costs. But it has a very difficult time putting the cost of IT in the language of the business -- being able to explain to the business the cost of a particular service that the business unit is consuming. ... In order to effectively asses the value of a particular business initiative, it’s important to know the actual cost of that particular initiative or process that they are supporting. IT needs to step up in order for you to be able to provide that information, so that the business as a whole can make better investment decisions.

Wills: One of the things that business intelligence (BI) can help with at this point is to identify the gaps in the data that’s being captured at an operational level and then tie that to the business decision that you want to make. ... BI comes along and says, "Well, gee, maybe you’re not capturing enough detailed information about business justification on future projects, on future maintenance activity, or on asset acquisition or the depreciation of assets." BI is going to help you collect that and then aggregate that into the answers to the central question that a CIO or senior IT management may ask.

Cheney: By doing so, IT organizations will, in effect, cut through a lot of the silo mentality, the manual error-prone processes, and they'll begin

Virtual computing, cloud computing, and some of these trends that we see really point towards the time being now for IT organizations to get their hands around cost at a detailed level and to have a process in place for capturing those cost.

operating much more as a business that will get actionable cost information. They can directly look at how they can contribute better to driving better business outcomes. So, the end goal is to provide that capability to let IT partner better with the business.

... The HP Financial Planning Analysis offering allows organizations to understand costs from a service-based perspective. We're providing a common extract transform load (ETL) capability, so that we can pull information from data sources. We can pull from our project portfolio management (PPM) product, our asset management product, but we also understand the customers are going to have other data sources out there.

They may have other PPM products they’ve deployed. They may have ERP tools that they're using. They may have Excel spreadsheets that they need to pull information from. We'll use the ETL capabilities to pull that information into a common data warehouse where we can then go through this process of allocating cost and doing the analytics.

Wills: We really want to formalize the way they're bringing cost data in from all of these Excel spreadsheets and Access databases that sit under somebody’s desk. Somebody keeps the monthly numbers in their own spreadsheets in a different department and they are spread around in all of these different systems. We really want to formalize that.

... Part of Financial Planning and Analysis is Cost Explorer, a very traditional BI capability in terms of visualizing data that’s applied to IT cost, while you search through the data and look at it from many different dimensions, color coding, looking at variants, and having this information pop out of you.

Cheney: [Looking to the future], in many respects, cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), and virtualization all present great opportunities to effectively leverage capital. IT organizations really need to look at it through the lens of what the intended business objectives are and how they can best leverage the capital that they have available to invest.

Wills: Virtual computing, cloud computing, and some of these trends that we see really point towards the time being now for IT organizations to get their hands around cost at a detailed level and to have a process in place for capturing those cost. The world, going forward, obviously doesn’t get simpler. It only gets more complex. IT organizations are really looked at for using capital wisely. They're really looked at as the decision makers for where to allocate that capital, and some of it’s going to be outside the four walls.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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In 'Everything as a Service' era, quality of services and processes grows paramount, says HP's Purohit

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Read a full transcript of the discussion.

As services pervade how and what IT delivers, quality assurance early and often becomes the gatekeeper of success -- or the points of failure.

IT's job is evolving to make sure all services really work deep inside of business process -- regardless of their origins and sourcing. Quality of component services is therefore assurance of quality processes, and so the foundation of general business conduct and productivity.

Pervasive quality is no longer an option, especially as more uses of cloud-enabled services and so-called "fluid sourcing" approaches become the norm.

A large part of making quality endemic becomes organizational, of asserting quality in everything IT does, enforcing quality in everything IT's internal and external partners do. Success even now means quality in how the IT department itself is run and managed.

To better learn how service-enabled testing and quality-enabling methods of running IT differently become critical mainstays of IT success, last week at HP Software Universe in Las Vegas I interviewed Robin Purohit, vice president of Software Products at HP Software and Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Severe restrictions on IT budgets force you to rethink things. ... What are you really good at, and do you have the skills to do it? Where can you best leverage others outside, whether it’s for a particular service you want them to run for you or for help on doing a certain project for you? How do you make sure that you can do your job really well, and still support the needs of the business while you go and use those partners?

We believe flexible outsourcing is going to really take off, just like it did back in 2001, but this time you’ll have a variety of ways. We can procure those services over the wire on a rateable basis from whatever you want to call them -- cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, whatever. IT's job will be to make sure all that stuff works inside the business process and services they’re responsible for.

If you think of it as marketplace of services that you're doing internally with maybe many outsource providers, making sure every one of those folks is doing their job well and that it comes together some way, means that you have to have quality in everything you do, quality in everything your partners do, and quality in the end process. Things like service-enabled testing, rather than service-oriented architecture (SOA), is going to become a critical mainstream attribute of quality assurance.

... What IT governance or cloud governance is going to be about is to make sure that you have a clear view of what your expectations are on both sides. Then, you have an automatic way of measuring it and tracking against it, so you can course correct or make a decision to either bring it back internally or go to another cloud provider. That’s going to be the great thing about the cloud paradigm -- you’ll have a choice of moving from one outsource provider to another.

The most important things to get right are the organizational dynamics. As you put in governance, you bring in outside parties -- maybe you’re doing things like cloud capabilities -- you're going to get resistance. You’ve got to train your team to how to embrace those things in the right way.

What we’re trying to do at HP is step up and bring advisory services to the table across everything that we do to help people think about

It’s all about allowing the CEO and their staffs to plan and strategize, construct and deliver, and operate services for the business in a co-ordinated fashion, and link all the decisions to business needs and checkpoints

how they should approach this in their organization, and where they can leverage potentially industry-best practices on the process side, to accelerate the ability for them to get the value out of some of these new initiatives that they are partaking in.

For the last 20 years, IT organizations have been building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and business intelligence (BI) systems that help you run the business. Now, wouldn’t it be great if there were a suite of software to run the business of IT?

It’s all about allowing the CEO and their staffs to plan and strategize, construct and deliver, and operate services for the business in a co-ordinated fashion, and link all the decisions to business needs and checkpoints. They make sure that what they do is actually what the business wanted them to do, and, by the way, that they are spending the right money on the right business priorities. We call that the service life cycle.

... There are things that we're doing with Accenture, for example, in helping on the strategy planning side, whether it’s for IT financial management or data-center transformation. We're doing things with VMware to provide the enabling glue for this data center of the future, where things are going to be very dynamically moving around to provide the best quality of service at the best cost.

... But, users want one plan. They don’t want seven plans. If there’s one thing they’re asking us to do more, faster, better, and with all of those ecosystem providers is to show them how they can get from their current state to that ideal future state, and do it in a coherent way.

There's no margin for error anymore.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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HP adds new consulting services to smooth the enterprise path to cloud adoption

Hewlett-Packard (HP), which already has an array of services to help customers chart their way through the challenges and opportunities of cloud computing, loaded two more arrows into its quiver yesterday with the announcement of HP Cloud Discovery Workshop and HP Cloud Roadmap Service.

The Palo Alto, Calif-based global IT giant is aiming the services at enterprise customers who are looking to efficiently drive business benefits from cloud. The goal, according to HP, is to help customers source, secure, and govern cloud services as an integral part of their IT strategy. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The HP Cloud Discovery Workshop is designed to help enterprise IT organizations learn about the cloud as a strategic service delivery option and how to leverage it as part of a broader IT service delivery strategy. Available in July, the workshop is designed to:

• Educate customers on the cloud and multi-sourcing service delivery strategies
  
  
• Outline benefits, risks and implications of the cloud within the business
  
  
• Provide recommendations on people, process and technology for using the cloud as part of an IT and business strategy.

The HP Cloud Roadmap Service, a follow-on to the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop, offers customers a service for planning and adopting cloud as part of their service delivery strategy. The service will:

• Provide specific recommendations for how customers should use cloud delivery and deployment models as part of their service delivery strategy
  
  
• Recommend the right service strategy, governance and program model
  
  
• Deliver a roadmap for cloud adoption, including a set of recommendations and benefits for what customers can achieve in practical and incremental steps

The array of cloud services currently offered to HP customers includes:

• Service Management Consulting Services
  
  
• Business Technology Optimization (BTO) Services
  
  
• Testing Services
  
  
• Cloud Infrastructure Design Service
  
  
• Cloud Infrastructure Installation and Deployment Services
  
  
• Scale-out and Cloud Security Services

One of HP's newest offerings, prior to today's announcement, was Cloud Assure, which consists of HP services and software, including HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center, and is delivered to customers via HP Software as a Service.