July 1st, 2009
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: turkeys voting for Christmas?
The love fest around Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is truly extraordinary. The geek crowd certainly seem to like it and Oracle does a great job of singing to the DBA crowd. Dana Gardner is positively effusive:
Oracle has sewn up its field brilliantly via its organic and aquisitions-fueled growth of the past decade. With Sun and its ID management, file system/directory, storage, Solaris community, and speedy silicon, the path to cloud seems inevitable and closer than most thought for Oracle. Incidentally, control of Java is more a strategic weapon than an enabler.
…and of course the spin machine goes into hyper drive.
In the Twitterverse, the real time proxy that served reasonably well for the failed registration and streaming service that was supposed to bring remote users into the event, Oracle’s PR tried to say that customers such as Vodafone, AT&T, Qualcomm and others ’support’ the move. I was not impressed. The tone then changed to ‘in favor of’ which immediately made me think of turkeys voting for Christmas. As I fired back:
I would have been much more impressed if Oracle had said: ‘And here are our customers who will tell you what they’re doing.’ As I write this there are no signs of that. I should not be surprised. The mega vendors are masters of pre-announcing ’stuff’ or providing other world demos that may hint at slivers of functionality available today but which really portend meat tomorrow. Or in Oracle’s case, 2010 and out.
If I was a a buyer though, I’d be worried about Oracle’s strategy. You can see it coming. It won’t be Miko Matsumura’s ‘One Ring to Rule Them All’ although it’s a cute image but a vise like grip on everything from hardware through middleware and on to applications. No vendor on the planet has successfully pulled off the ‘end to end one stop shop’ trick and Oracle most certainly won’t do it. Regardless of the hubris.
There’s a certain paradox in all of this because in order to reach this position, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison needed to hand Charles Phillips, Oracle President a check for $25bn+ to fund 58 acquisitions (I’m glad he reminded us, I’d lost count) in six years. It’s a pantomime horse of many moving parts the company is trying to pull together and which may one day see its nadir in Fusion Applications. I’m wondering whether this will be Oracle’s cue to take a stroll down Butt Hole Road. That and its laser focus on pleasing Wall Street explains why customers continue to contribute to Oracle’s obscene bottom line.
I’m still betting that in the long term, Oracle’s strategy will be shown as fundamentally flawed. The turkeys may be voting for Christmas in July, but I wonder how they’ll feel come December 24th. If not 2009 then 2010.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 07/01/09
