I’ve been itching to write and simultaneously dreading writing this post for the last 48 hours. That’s because I know that whatever I say about Oracle 11g, and in particular, Oracle SOA Suite, will be perceived by our readers — with some justification — as hopelessly biased. After all, ActiveVOS is the primary competitor to SOA Suite, and it’s my job to make that clear to anyone interested in BPM. Many will expect only self-serving commentary. Still, there will be lots of talk about 11g and we certainly have an interest in its impact on the marketplace.
What may not be so obvious is that despite the perceived bias, I really do want to try to get beyond our obvious self-interest to communicate something even more important, which is less about ActiveVOS than about the difference between what a vendor with a new mega-release says and what it would mean to actually use the system.
In a nutshell, Oracle didn’t pull it off.
Let me explain.
I attended an 11g and SOA Suite launch seminar this week. Oracle drew a good audience from among its current customers. And, in a positive leading indicator, a majority of the customers were interested in SOA Suite, primarily for business process management.
Between the keynote and the SOA Suite breakout, I counted over 150 PowerPoint slides. Endlessly repeated claims of being “unified,” and “#1 in the market,” and “placed in the ‘leaders’ quadrant’” by every analyst on the planet. Screenshots and Shockwave (Shockwave??!!) demos of bits and pieces of products. (The Shockwave demos failed, if you can believe it. The demon of all software companies that trashes demos lives on…)
Their message? In 11g and in SOA Suite, Oracle has achieved the incomprehensible: a unification of dozens of acquisitions into a single coherent, “unified, hot-pluggable, standards-based” whole that can be easily implemented and used.
What’s amazing about this — and what I know you’d have seen too if you were in the room — isn’t that people doubt this claim…it’s that they are so overwhelmed by the opposite reality as demonstrated by Oracle’s presentation that they just didn’t know what to think. The audience was so inundated by bits and pieces of this or that product that were obviously silos that they were, literally, dumbstruck. They were speechless…and not from epiphany.
I was astonished that at the end of the SOA Suite breakout, there wasn’t a single question asked by customers. Partly embarrassed for Oracle by the silence, I asked a question and an industry analyst asked a question. That was it. After 70 slides — with no live product demo — and 90 minutes of saying all the right things, not a word. No discussion. No buzz. People just didn’t know what to think.
If after millions of hours of development, billions of dollars in acquisitions and a deluge of PowerPoint slides hewing to fashion — “We’ve got CEP! We’ve got BPMN 2.0! We’ll migrate you to 11g automatically! We’ll run BPEL and BPMN 2.0 natively, side-by-side and models can share metadata! JDeveloper is the tool to use! We support development in Eclipse! We have SCA!” — you just can’t figure out how your organization could be successful quickly and easily with all this, there’s a problem. If after all this, you haven’t got a question you could ask in public — if there wasn’t one thing you wanted to clarify for yourself — there’s a big, big problem.
And that problem is the customers in the room just couldn’t picture themselves being successful with SOA Suite. Despite all the talk about “unified” it was embarrassingly clear that 11g is a “product” only its legions of product managers and engineers could love.
It’s like the runway model pictured above. He’s wearing the right color (black, of course). And he looks like a model with that pouty expression. But that hairdo! It just doesn’t work. Apparently, the designer looked around the fashion world, bought up everything he could, spent a long time laboring over the costume, then trotted it out on the catwalk to shocked silence as everyone in the room realized that the pieces — the pants, the shirt, the hairdo — just don’t work together.
Update October 20, 2009: See what we’ve done to make people aware of the size and bloat of Oracle SOA Suite here, here and here.
