What's With Oracle and Flex?

Adobe's Flex seems to be cropping up across the enterprise vendor space. It's made a clean sweep of the BI vendor products (a much smaller group these days). And now Flex seems to be making major inroads in SAP and Oracle.

I wonder however if this is real strategy at work, or just an example of a good cohesive solution filling the void in the midst of AJAX-chaos?

I'd commented before on SAP's adoption, and they seem to have stolen the limelight over the past year. It was easy to forget a no-fanfare announcement of Flex support by Oracle at OpenWorld 2006. It was just PR after all - and seems to have dropped off the Internet! But it seems one of the most lasting impressions of OpenWorld 2007 was the promiscuous proliferation of Flex in the various demos and announcements.

James Ward (the Adobe RIA Cowboy) reported the usage in his blog, and has apparently been working closely with Oracle on their adoption.

It was very interesting to hear RedMonk's Michael Coté picking this discussion up in their "RIA Weekly" podcasts - with gossip about OpenWorld sightings in Episode 01, with more depth about the specific product teams using Flex in Episode 02.

As James & Michael discuss, Oracle's adoption seems to be of the common "stick your widgets in our page" style. The flagship adoptions are so far MetaLink (selected pages only), and BI Publisher (yet to release).

Flex is pretty cool, I agree. But it is hard to discern a broad RIA strategy at work here.

AJAXWorld might have been controversial by splitting the RIA world into two camps (Should You Choose AJAX or Adobe?). Choose Ajax or Flex? I think Oracle's answer may simply be "we need to choose?"

Consider Oracle is also playing many other AJAX cards: OpenAJAX Alliance support; quite a bit of true AJAX used in various products; and "AJAX" support in ADF/JSF [although as far as I can figure, it's all IFrame-based].

Does any of this really tell us anything about the strategic direction for Oracle Fusion Applications UI technology?

Now that the Oracle AppsLab guys are Back from OpenWorld, I'd be really keen to hear their take on all this. In fact, I'd expect that guys like James Ward were engaged with OracleAppsLab and the AppsLab blog should be the place to get the inside running.

But back to my original, cynical observation. I have a sneaking suspicion that we're seeing Flex pop up all over the enterprise space for one simple reason: Adobe have a good pitch, and a product that is nicely wrapped up and walled in (even questions of Flex's openness seem to have fallen by the wayside). The AJAX elevator pitch just isn't in such good a shape.

Hence so much easy to push a top-down directive to "skin it with Flex". It may even accidentally be the best long term decision for your product.

Oracle/SAP Battlelines for the Future Enterprise - take #2

OK, I jumped the gun by about 12 hours when I posted my little pitch on why the battle for enterprise developer mindshare will prove more significant than the recent focus on BI acquisitions by Oracle and SAP.

Now we have the news that Oracle is offering to buy BEA Systems. Long a favourite speculation, its amazing to see it really happen. If this goes through it will basically make IBM and Oracle the two leading Enterprise Java Platform providers.

Certainly Oracle couldn't risk BEA ending up in SAP's hands, and Oracle has long been strategically committed to Java. But holding such a strong hand could be a problem if it leads to a kind of Java-only tunnel vision.

Oracle/SAP Battlelines for the Future Enterprise

The big news in the enterprise over the past week has of course been SAP's aquisition of Business Objects. While this definitely marks another major milestone in the consolidation of the BI industry, there's some questioning on just how important this will prove to be in the long term.

My personal feeling is that in a few years we may look back and realise that all the BI news obscured the real story of the day ... James Governor's post on Mashing up SAP may appear to be an innocent conference write-up, but could be seen as one of the early shots fired in the ultimate battle between SAP and Oracle for the enterprise developer (dressed up as "Enterprise Mashups" or "Enterprise 2.0" if you wish).

I'm expecting this to be a key battleground over the next couple of years. By 2009, we'll begin to see full convergence of the *2.0/RIA trend along with the componentisation/service-enablement of the ERP suites (call it SOA or SCA). This will herald a new era of enterprise development, where customers will expect to buy and configure standard software components from Oracle/SAP, but then deploy for use within highly tailored and personalised "user-interaction environments" (web pages or portals in today's terminology, but on steroids).

If this is the future, then the application back-end risks commoditisation and the vendor that owns the hearts and minds of the enterprise development community will take the crown. And SIs who make their bacon implementing enterprise applications have had their warning: one day soon you will wake up and the world will have changed. Not ready? Sorry, you're out of business.

In this context, Web 2.0 has just been a warm-up lap for taking on the enterprise.

We can see the battle lines being drawn. I think the Adobe-SAP partnership, which has been getting a lot of positive press of late, may go down in history as way more significant than BO. Events like RedMonk's enterprise mashup track at the upcoming SAP TechEd in Munich continue to highlight their embrace of the rich internet application development community.

I like their theme ... "driving accidental awesomeness" ... the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed (William Gibson).

Of course, Oracle has not been silent. One could even argue that just like the Hyperion acquisition prompted SAP to move on BO, it was Oracle's vision for Fusion Applications got the ball rolling in the first place. As I've blogged before though, Oracle appears to be a little slow to embrace the implications for enterprise developers ... that is, until Oracle AppsLab hit the scene.

Oracle has done a great deal to attract diverse developer audiences (from PHP to .NET to an interesting category of "non-PHP scripting languages"), but this is generally not applications-related. Of course it's own application development strategy currently remains firmly committed to Java and ADF in particular. What will be most interesting is how we see Oracle incorporate the needs of (non-ADF) "mashup" developers as Fusion Applications become concrete.

So in one sense it appears Oracle and SAP are pursuing diametrically opposed strategies - SAP hunting for communities to "adopt" and build (like Adobe), whereas the Oracle approach is perhaps a bit more like "build it well, and they will come". It will be interesting to watch this one play out ...

SOA/Enterprise 2.0. The Rebel Alliance takes on Deathstar-2.0

What is the driving force for *2.0 in the enterprise? Deathstar-2.0 jokes aside, Billy (Fusion ECM) and Jake (AppsLab) have been nutting this out. Billy's in the "its all about the data" camp, and Jake's taking the "power to the people" stance. Bex has chipped in with a view that "its about knowledge".

You may think its a cop-out, but I think its a case of you're all right. Depends on what perspective you want to take.

Yes, its all about me, but in the same way that driving around town is all about me. Until a semi wants to cut into my lane. On the road we have established ways of collaborating to keep things moving nicely (signals, lane markers, the odd toot of a horn). It's all about me in the sense that I want to safely get to where I'm going. But the roads department has a broader objective.

I'd suggest that the real difference with Web-2.0 in the wild is that there really is no broader objective to speak of. I blog. I like. That's good enough for me.

But in an enterprise, there's always an over-riding agenda that's bigger than any individual: profitability, customer satisfaction, market share etc. If that's not front of mind, you deserve a pink slip .. give you lots of time for facebook!

With that in mind, I'd like to share a visualisation of the enterprise I call the "SOA Sphere". Not perfect, by tries to cram a number of key concepts together:

• Information (data/knowledge) is the core asset of an organisation


• Business Services/processes/applications collaborate with users and act upon the knowledge base


• Security is an all-encompassing capability; a key enabler of innovation


• People live, breath and work together in the environment that these services create. No distinction really between employees, customers, partners or the great unwashed

Fellow travellers on the road to Fusion..

At one point, the cynical would have said that Fusion is just a con to placate all the PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards customers. Others just complained about the con-fusion.

Of course, Fusion Applications are still a way off in the future, and I'm not sure if even Oracle Development really know in full cinematic detail what shipping the products will really entail. Its all still fairly big-picture stuff .. although in classic Oracle style, the user/user experience seems to have got lost along the way. But there's enough pressure and creativity that I think we will see the current Fusion formula grow an additional term at some point. i.e.

Fusion = Grid Computing + SOA + Enterprise Information Architecture
will become
Fusion = Grid Computing + SOA + Enterprise Information Architecture + Web 2.0

In other words, potentially the best darn definition of "Enterprise 2.0" in the market so far!

In the meantime however, some things are coming into clear focus. One is the critical importance of SOA and Security Fusion Middleware components (a.k.a. Oracle Application Server). This struck home for me when listening to the recent AppCast interview with Cliff Godwin who is now heading Oracle's Fusion Upgrade Program Office. What is the world coming to.. Oracle Applications folks selling technology?!!

The true test of fusion will be the extent to which it is embraced by customers and the user community. It was great to see Floyd Teter kick-off a new series on his blog where he will be covering his company's Detailed Roadmap to Fusion Applications. Hats off to Floyd for the courage to do this in the open, and to provide the necessary detail that will actually make this useful for others considering the same path.