The Oracle is Getting Big Around the Middle
October 19th, 2009 by Michael Rowley
Scary big. That is how big Oracle is in middleware. After bragging that they had beat BEA to be #2 in the middleware market, they bought them. Then, with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has control over the underlying technologies of Java and Java EE, plus the primary open-source challenge to their database dominance. Of course, IBM has also done its share of gobbling up middleware companies, so between them, the number of products and acquisitions has become overwhelming. We made exactly that point last week at Oracle “Open”World by dressing up actors as prisoners “shackled” to Oracle SOA Suite (Check out the hi-jinks here, here and here.)
Up to now, enterprises have typically had one choice that drove most other technology choices in the data center: .Net or Java. If you chose .Net, then you are a Microsoft shop and you’ve decided that the advantages of living in a single vendor world outweigh the disadvantages of being tied to that one vendor. However, if you chose to go with Java, you probably did so because you wanted to then live in the world of standards-based technologies, where for each technology purchase, you could separately evaluate products from a number of competing vendors.
But now, with much of the Java middleware world being absorbed into one of two vendors, the era of having a choices for each purchase is coming to an end. Instead, there will be just one big decision. Do you want to be a Microsoft shop, an Oracle shop or an IBM shop? All other decisions will flow from that initial decision. This is because the development teams in each of those companies will naturally be forced to give a high priority to getting any new software to work with existing software from the same company. Getting it to work with the other company’s software will be a “goal,” but as someone deeply involved in the development of software products, trust me when I tell you those are the kinds of goals that tend to slip as the ship date of any product nears.
Does it matter? Isn’t three enough? Yes, it matters. And no, three isn’t enough. Actually, the real problem isn’t the small number of choices; it is that the switching costs are just too high. If there were three good choices for each purchase, that wouldn’t be so bad. But when you are virtually locked into a single vendor for each new purchase once you’ve started down the road of buying from them, then it is a real problem. The lack of competition for individual products removes critical competitive pressures from individual product lines, so the products grow to become heavy, badly integrated, expensive beasts.
And, if enterprises have to pay more for lower quality software on their servers, this affects everyone. The ultimate consumer pays for the more expensive software in higher prices, but they pay even more for the lower productivity that comes from software that is hard to use, hard to manage, and unresponsive to the needs of the business.
We get up in the morning and think about what we can do to make ActiveVOS the antithesis of the bloatware from Oracle and IBM.
Tags: BPM, oracle, soa suite 11g
