Oracle in Three in One Cloud : PaaS, SaaS, DaaS

After adverse comments last year, Larry Ellison announced that Oracle got into Cloud in a big way. It is significantly different than CRM on Demand. It also adopts different approach than Multi-Tenant Sales Force. Oracle's public Cloud provides: PAAS (Platform As A Service), SaaS (Software As A Service) and Daas (Database As a Service). It has five components:

* Oracle’s Fusion Applications (HCM and CRM) SaaS
* Oracle Fusion Middleware : PaaS
* Oracle Database : DaaS
* Sun Systems, OS, VM : PaaS
* Social Network : SaaS

This announcement puts Oraccle in competition with Amazon, and Salesforce, which are the clear leaders in the public cloud computing space.

Good to see that CRM and HCM are in the pack. Last year I helped CRM and earlier Talent management from HCM in this initiative. This puts Oracle in direct competition with SalesForce, WorkDay and SuccessFactor (on Talent management side).

Oracle also announced Social Network for enterprises. It would allow social networking featers like sharing and following private to enterprises. Does it sound like Salesforce's Chatter? While on the topic of SalesForce, the approach Oracle for most of the component is virtualization based where every customer gets its own pack and not sharing with others as in multi-tenant softwares like SalesForce. This addresses someof the privacy concerns. Enterprises can customize the cloud based Fusion apps by SOA , BPEL, BPM and ADF standards based Fusion Middleware. Oracle's Database as a Service is in competition with similar provision on Amazon.

Oracle also provides Java stack as PaaS in competition with VMWare's CloudFoundry, Redhat's OpenShift and Salesforce's Heroku.

According to Ellison, Oracle’s new public cloud will be available for a monthly subscription and will include resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, self-service sign up, elastic capacity on-demand, virus scanning, and more.

However, pricing and availability is yet to be announced.

Visit http://cloud.oracle.com

Does Enterprise Apps on a Box make sense?

In OOW 2009, Larry Ellison presented a powerful case of DB on a Box Machine. He demonstrated Exadata2 for almost more than half of his presentation time. It is a good story to make customer up and running quickly and saving from chasing different vendors. However, he presented it in the context of Database. Wouldn't the same model make sense for Apps too? It's is kind of different than the current momentum to SaaS and Cloud. But installing, configuring, tuning and setting up enterprise Apps is a time consuming process involving multiple vendors and skills. If that can be reduced by this Apps on A Box model, would it be better?

Finally Oracle acquired BEA

You may have already heard it! Read it !

yes... Finally...Oracle acquired BEA.



"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Ellison. "Oracle Fusion middleware has an open "hot-pluggable" architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA's WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That's just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come."



"For Oracle, this deal is a very big step toward completing our vision of becoming a strategic enterprise software vendor of choice for our customers, with industry-leading products and a world-class technology solution at every level of the stack and across industry verticals," CEO Larry Ellison said in a conference call.

BPM: Close loop integration between Modeling, Execution and Monitoring of Business Process

Life-cycle issues in BPM:
It is well understood that Business analysts need a business friendly tool to capture requirement, model a process and / document a process. Many modeling tools are already available and are key in any BPM strategy. The business analysts do not implement those processes. Especially it is true for "executable processes" like BPEL. IT developers or system integrators often take a business requirement and turn them into an executable business process. There is always a chance of a communication gap. Off course, a proper review would reduce chances of such reviews. However, if a business analyst needs to review BPEL process, he would neither be comfortable nor be capable of. In such scenario, it is definitely useful to have an automatic generation of BPEL process and many modeling tools generate BPEL processes.

However, the key of modeling is to be higher level and capture key business activities. A modeler can capture some key business activities, however, none of these would be or should be complete. Hence, IT developer / SI would need to add details or implement specific business as well as technical activities to make the process complete. They may add data transformations, validations, error handling, or implement specific handshaking required by internal/external partners. Some of these, details may need to surfaced to the model. Otherwise, over a period of time, the model start getting out of sync with the implemented process. Thus, round tripping is important.

While a process can be modified at the time of or after implementation by IT/SIs, the business analyst may also need to change the model to reflect a changing business need. Thus there would be changes in both the original model as well as the generated business process. This is a very valid case in a life cycle of a business process. So the key is to support merging the changes.

Oracle BPM:
In the month of September, Oracle announced a next updated version of its BPA (Business Process Analysis) Suite which supports closed loop integration between modeling and execution models. Oracle being a vendor providing a comprehensive solution in BPM-Integration space, has offered such tighter integration between various tools and by providing a standards based (BPMN) business friendly modeler, a standards(BPEL) based process designer, an execution runtime as well as monitoring environment (SOA Suite).

This new version supports thus provides "a closed-loop engineering and bi-directional sync'ing capabilities, enabling business analysts and developers to closely collaborate throughout the entire BPM life cycle using the best tools for their specific needs".

Using Oracle BPM Suite: Modeler and IT/SI experience
Using these products, a modeler can model a process, and then publish it. Using JDev based BPEL designer, an IT developer/SI can explore this published model and start with its "blue print" which is a common model between BPMN and BPEL. The BPEL process can further be refined with implementation details and would be published. If the modeler changes the process model and republishes it, the IT/SI developer would get a visual notification in his/her JDev. The developer can sync up the process, see the differences, merge the changes (comparing the new versus existing process) and implement the details for the newly added business activities related.

Seamless Integration with Monitoring:
Oracle's BPM suite also helps in monitoring. The modeler can specify (select) monitoring points, the generated BPEL would carry all the "sensor instrumentation" without a need to add them manually. These sensor data can be fed to Oracle's BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) module which can provide a real time dashboard.

The execution can potentially be analyzed and the analysis can be used in further refining the business process model, thus completing the circle of life cycle activities.

Oracle strengthens Enterprise Apps GRC: Governance, Risk and Compliance

On October 9th, 2007, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire LogicalApps, a leading provider of automated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) controls for enterprise applications. The transaction is expected to close by November 2007. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

LogicalApps solutions enable customers to automate GRC activities, such as enforcing proper segregation of duties in enterprise applications, reducing fraud with continuous monitoring of business transactions, and providing defensible evidence of a proper control environment. LogicalApps solutions already are optimized for Oracle Applications, with hundreds of successful deployments.

With LogicalApps' automated control capabilities, Oracle plans to extend its GRC application suite after the closing to deliver a closed-loop solution that manages both enterprise-wide GRC processes and enforcement of automated controls within one system

New license growth of Oracle Fusion Middleware... from Quaterly report...

Larry Ellison reported in a quaterly report (March 20th 2007)

“Our middleware new license sales grew 82% in the third quarter and 62% over the last
twelve months,” said CEO, Larry Ellison. “This compares to BEA’s growth rate of 8% in their most recently reported quarter and 12% over their last year. Not only are we growing faster than BEA, we’re now larger than they are in the middleware business.”

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/investor_relations/earnings/3q07-pressrelease-march.pdf