Gartner on Oracle’s SOA strategy: “…unlikely to offer….innovations”
October 15th, 2008 by Alex Neihaus
Beware: this post is going to sound like I’m gloating. And, well, I am…a little.
It started when one of our sales guys emailed me a link to Rich Seeley’s blog post of yesterday titled “Gartner cautions on Oracle middleware status.” Rich was summarizing Gartner’s latest thinking about Oracle’s indiscriminate mish-mash…uh, excuse me…Oracle’s SOA and middleware “suites” (there’s more than one?) after the BEA acquisition.
I started smiling when Rich wrote:
“Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for…the next six to 12 months.”
If you’ve been around a while, you surely know that this kind of statement is analyst speak for “they’ve got a big bunch of SOA stuff they have to integrate, and you know it’s going to hurt, so delay the pain.”
But I didn’t really expect Gartner to ‘fess up and call Oracle’s SOA acquisition gluttony (OSAG) wrong-headed and that the best answer, the implementable answer, the affordable answer, the I-can-implement-my-SOA-applications-right-now answer is a visual orchestration system like ActiveVOS.
(Pick your reason why from among these four choices. A: We aren’t a Gartner client. B: We aren’t as big a Gartner client as Oracle. C: If Gartner did think that VOSs were the answer, they couldn’t call them visual orchestration systems because they didn’t invent the term. D: A, B, and C.)
Then, I clicked on the link Rich provided in his blog post to the Gartner’s analysts’ summary. And, behind the verbiage about Oracle becoming a “more-cautious market leader” (also well-known code for slow, big, heavy, expensive and…did I say…expensive?) was this revealing statement:
“In the longer term, Oracle must find a way to preserve its culture of innovation while adopting the new culture of the reliable, conservative mainstream platform vendor. In the short term, the Oracle middleware organization is unlikely to offer any surprising innovations.”
Let me ask you an important question: are you willing to bet your next-generation applications on a SOA vendor who isn’t innovative? What if Apple had sent you a box of piece parts containing a PC board, a disk drive, a case and incomplete source code on disk and told you to build your iPod and iTunes yourself?
The Gartner analysts have done SOA evaluators a real service here. The conclusion is very carefully couched, of course, because if Gartner had to live on what we might spend with them, they’d be as hungry as an Icelandic bank. But it’s there for all to see and in plain sight: if you want your SOA applications to be built on a slow moving target, go with the big fat dude.
What they don’t say, however, but what I can freely say is that if you want real SOA innovation, check out our visual orchestration system, ActiveVOS.
October 15th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[...] Oracle’s been taking a bit of a beating lately, with Gartner stating that their middleware suites are “assemblies of convenience”, and that they are unlikely to offer any surprising innovations in the short term as they’re attempting to resolve the overlap and incompatibilities between the Oracle and BEA product lines. Gartner’s saying “watch this space”, but some of Oracle’s competitors are interpreting that as “they’ve got a big bunch of SOA stuff they have to integrate, and you know it’s going to h…. [...]