Tag Archives: Larry Ellison

The Legacy of Enterprise 2.0–Concluding thoughts from the Conference

by Miko Posted on November 9, 2009

The absolute highlight of last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was meeting in person and online many very bright people including Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Susan Scrupski, Michael Krigsman and many others. There’s certainly a strong discourse here about advancing the agenda for Enterprise computing.

As with many advanced topics in Enterprise computing, it’s very easy to take a potshot: as we all know:

crocky

* SOA is Dead (Anne Thomas Manes)
* Enterprise 2.0 what a Crock (Dennis Howlett) and
* Cloud is Water Vapor (Larry Ellison)

One link that got me to thinking was posted by Nenshad–Tomio Geron from the Wall Street Journal blogged about the vast number of venture backed startups that have failed this year.

Pundits aside, I think there is a very easy “Crock Test” that can definitively answer Dennis Howlett’s question. The question wont be answered by a failed panel discussion. No matter how pithy, it wont be answered by a blog post. The closest thing to the “Crock Test” came from Susan Scrupski’s “last and only response to crock-gate”, a list of organizations involved in the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council. The problem with the list is that the names are just names–you kind of want to be able to click on them to see the case studies, if any.

Which brings me to the “Crock Test”. Unfortunately, the test will require some degree of patience. We will definitively know if Enterprise 2.0 is a crock if in 20, 30 or 40 years we can look back on all of the Enterprise 2.0 legacy software that has been created.

As I mentioned in 5 definitions towards the maturing of Enterprise 2.0, legacy is another word for the software projects that worked. So here’s hoping we will be looking back at Susan’s list of companies and seeing a list of case studies about the depth and scope of transformation and a list of the huge successful companies built on top of Enterprise 2.0–not a list of failed ones.

To be fair, the failed companies on the list come from a large number of sectors–it’s just a sobering list, not a condemnation of #e20

My 2 cents,
Miko

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Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware LiveBlogging and News Analysis

by Miko Posted on July 1, 2009

Stand by for Oracle Fusion 11g Middleware Launch Liveblogging and analysis from SOA Center.

Java is the new SQL
We’re on a code level orange this morning as buzz on the networks is up. Despite Oracle’s news embargo, we’re already picking up chatter that one of the big ticket items from the Oracle Fusion Middleware launch is Tera-scale Java Object cacheing.

This is a great technology trend and great thinking.

While a few startup companies have attacked the so-called “Complex Event Processing” space (CEP), they have done so using esoteric APIs such as SQL query-like APIs for example StreamBase. This is an early-adopter (read:sucker) approach because who wants to build completely new applications?

There’s a clear answer to that rhetorical question: very few do. To see Coral8 be swallowed up by Aleri and other CEP vendors struggling out there, it’s clear that only the edgy applications such as fraud and intrusion detection, networked battlefield, casino gaming and a few other apps need the combination of real time and massive event window correlation provided by CEP. Whenever there’s a “paradigm shift”, look for a Moore’s Law style 10x improvement underlying it.

New business paradigms grow across stable interfaces (platforms) with an order of magnitude impedance mismatch. Oracle and the relational database ecosystem grew originally on top of SQL and the spinning disk drive platter and has maintained its advantage because of this mismatch. Adobe grew on top of PostScript and originally at the boundary between the printer and personal computer. BEA grew on top of the Java API through their timely acquisition of WebLogic, through the boundary between the “computer” and the “network”.

So what’s the 10x (or more) improvement in the underlying platform? It’s the expansion of RAM which is experiencing a Moore’s-law like doubling interval. The difference between spinning disk (millisecond scale) and RAM (nanosecond scale) is six or seven orders of magnitude.

So what are the implications for this huge shift into RAM? Well, there’s already some wonderful cacheing technologies like Tangosol (Oracle already bought them) that deal with pure SQL. But the age of the relational SQL API is coming to a close. Now like any good legacy, SQL will be immortal just like COBOL. But the emerging dominant API will be much more about the network and developer than about the underlying technology. What API better than Java? We see another company, Terracotta systems taking single VM Java semantics and clustering them using aspect technology from a crashed UFO. We see RNA Networks putting JMS onto a RAM cacheing box and kicking TIBCO out of a hedge fund company.

So SQL is toast.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/large_databases/print.html

The future of low latency has come, and it looks like Java.

So what does this say about Oracle’s strategy for forming SNORKEL, the Sun acquisition? Well, at the risk of reductio ad absurdum, having bought BEA and Sun, Larry Ellison sees Java as the new SQL.

Stay tuned for more news analysis and liveblogging.

my 2 cents,
Miko

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Platforms for cloud services

by Miko Posted on November 12, 2008

Larry Ellison’s quote on Cloud Computing was pretty awesome:

“The software industry is more fashion driven than ladies apparel!!!”

Which isnt neccesarily a bad thing. The time cycles of fashion and technology have collided and given birth to “this year’s pink” iPod and “Blue is the new Green” cell phones. Hats off to Steve Jobs.

Relevant to my previous “End of SOA SOA Sky is Falling Henny Penny 2.0” blog post, Frank Kenney from Gartner posted a great blog about the current state of SOA.

Lets face is SOA is deeply unfashionable right now.

The bottom line as alluded to my tongue in cheek headline is that Enterprises have very little choice in the matter. Regardless of the framing of it, they have a deep problem with heterogeneous architecture, legacy systems, the need to externalize declarative logic, regulatory pressure, ongoing cost control issues, loss of control of IT to consultants and vendors and the inability to adapt to changing business requirements, especially business process.

Whether this architectural response is called SOA, turnip farming, platforms for cloud services or bananafish, there is really only one rational response which is abstraction… and the stabilization of Enterprise IT along interface lines that are coarse grained will continue and this trend will seperate the successful IT shops from the losers. And the losers will be swept away.

So all the clever analysts who give you the nudge and the wink and say yeah, that SOA thing didnt work, sure they have to make their money somehow. And they have to keep writing about something new, maybe that will be the “Cloud”.

The bottom line is that the downturn is a good time to clean house. The IT shops that come out of the downturn with a revamped infrastructure strategy can capture market share. Be bold when others are fearful (Warren Buffet’s words, not mine). Call it whatever you want, but focus on stabilizing and abstracting your legacy of heterogenaety and complexity behind coarsely grained interfaces–because with virtualization and cloud, everything underneath is up for grabs. And with BPM, Mashups, Enterprise 2.0 and trendy trend 3.0, everything up top is also up for grabs.

My 2 cents,
Miko

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