VOSibilities

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.

Well, it’s the day after our big push to liberate Oracle SOA Suite 11g users during Oracle “Open”World in San Francisco.

And I am almost at a loss of words to describe our experience and the effect we seemed to have had. But, I gotta try. Here are some semi-random comments.

We are extraordinarily grateful for IDG News reporter Chris Kanaracus’s story, which perfectly captured the reasons we stood on a street corner for two days to make sure people understand that alternatives to high costs and lock-in exist.

Our social media meetup was a great success…and a lot of fun. We shared photos and videos of the event. (Here’s a video of the main reason for the party. ) I kid you not, the coolest people are the people who you befriend first online and then have the pleasure of meeting in the real world.

On Tuesday, October 14, we were hit with a rain storm that dumped a month of rain on San Francisco in about six hours. In spite of the high winds and Biblical downpours, we persisted in our mission of liberation from Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

You can check out videos on our YouTube channel (you have to see…and I mean you really have to see — the video titled “In the rain”), see stills in our Flickr photostream and, for our podcast subscribers, I’ve enclosed a short iPod-formatted video in the RSS feed. There’s also an HD-version of the video, for those that want to “be there” with us. Both are attached to this post.

Finally, you might find Otis Maxwell’s post about our attack on SOA Suite interesting. Otis’s description of how he found our meetup is very interesting. He calls what we did “suitcasing.” I think it’s simpler: we poked Oracle in the eye…and people loved it.

In case you are one of the folks who didn’t get the cards we handed out with the 11 things to consider before using SOA Suite 11g, here’s an image:

As you can imagine, pulling something like this off takes planning and dedication. I want to thank Sonal Rajan and Leslie Minasian, both of Active Endpoints, and Pat Flanders for their hard work and dedication.

 Active Endpoints at Oracle "Open"World 2009 - iPod [6:10m]: Download (710)
 Active Endpoints at Oracle "Open"World 2009 - HD [6:10m]: Download (407)

PC World had this to say about ActiveVOS at Oracle OpenWorld today (full article here):

Not everyone at the show was buying into Oracle’s middleware pitch.

Representatives of ActiveVOS, which makes a product that competes with Oracle’s SOA Suite, capered on street corners outside the Moscone Center wearing comical black-and-white prisoners’ garb, begging passers-by to “free” them from the alleged higher cost and constraints of owning SOA Suite.

We appreciate everyone who stopped by today and laughed with us (or cried, as appropriate) as we stood outside Moscone and made it clear there are alternatives to expensive, complex products like Oracle SOA Suite 11g. We’re glad we made you (and thousands of others) smile.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, the management team here met for a day to try to distill into a few words what we think is responsible for our recent successes. After all, customers have plenty of other apparent alternatives, from both behemoth software companies as well as smaller competitors.

After much discussion, we think we know what’s going on: ActiveVOS is winning new customers because, simply, it’s the BPMS that development teams love.

With that phrase, we think we have described why we succeed in a competitive market in tough economic times. ActiveVOS simply does a better job of what the extended development team — business analysts and software engineers collaborating with end users — needs to do to implement integrated, end-to-end processes that include both human workflows and automated systems. (For a revealing look at the relationship between end-users and development teams, watch a replay of Sandy Kemsley debunking the “four myths” of end user process development.)

OK, I know how this must sound to you. It’s what you’d expect from the marketing department: a cheery, upbeat, sunny view of our product devoid of any technical content. But the truth is that enthusiasm for your BPM system — how “cool” it is, how easily you can get your processes modeled and deployed — makes a huge difference in the results and the organization’s ultimate satisfaction with their BPM efforts.

So, ask yourself how emotionally attached you think you could get to the BPMS you are evaluating. Think about the level of effort the salespeople have to go to get you to overlook the challenges of ease of use, integration and features for collaboration their products present. Count the number of times they had to take you to lunch to develop that “personal touch”  – really just a way to get you to bond to them instead of their BPMS.

We recommend instead that you skip the high-calorie lunch, download a supported trial of ActiveVOS, start a proof-of-concept, and find out for yourself why ActiveVOS is generating such a positive reaction in the BPMS marketplace.

Active Endpoints, in collaboration with fifteen other vendors and enterprises, announces formation of group to promote web services interoperability.

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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.

Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.

Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).

I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.

Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.

Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.

Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything  — else out there.

Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.

I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.

Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.

That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.

We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.

[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]

 

 VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (485)