A quick take on Oracle and Sun

Earlier this year IBM (and reportedly) HP both took Sun Microsystems out for first dates but neither decided to take things any further (though IBM arguably got to second base). Now it seems Oracle is prepared to go the whole way with the iconic dot.com technology brand. Are we looking at a beautiful wedding on the beach in Maui, or a drunken fumble in a dark alley followed by recriminations, tears and vengeful fathers?

It's telling that in this era of instant communication I feel under pressure to say something incisive and erudite, even though it's only a few hours since the acquisition was announced and hundreds of other commentators have heard the same conference calls and read the same press releases. So what is there to say beyond "blimey, I never saw that coming"? (Because it's true, I didn't – and I never would have put Oracle on the list if I'd been asked to draw one up). I'll take a deep breath.

I think the most telling take-away I got from all the materials available from the two parties today was the balance of information about earnings, assets and market shares vs. information about shared vision and customer value (there was a bit of the latter in evidence from Jonathan Schwartz and Chuck Philips, but it sounded distinctly lacking in energy). By contrast Oracle CFO Safra Catz was by far the most animated exec on the call, particularly as she explained how Sun would contribute more operating income in its first year as part of Oracle ($1.5bn) than BEA and PeopleSoft did combined (an interesting side note: Oracle paid more for BEA than it intends to for Sun, despite that tasty financial upside. Aren’t stock markets fantastic).

I wouldn't go as far as Vinnie Mirchandani (executive summary: Oracle is just after making a quick buck and has a poor track record of sustaining innovation following its acquisitions), but I remain to be convinced as to whether this has any positive implications for customers of either Oracle or Sun. You could argue that with Oracle as banker, Sun customers can now have more confidence about the future of their technology choices: but squeezing out $1.5bn operating income out of a company that's only occasionally managed to turn any kind of a profit in the recent past is going to mean quite a lot of "shrinkage" – the kind of shrinkage that cuts much deeper than the back office. So a future rich in systems innovation is far from certain, at least in the short-to-medium term. And in the current environment, with data center economics shifting so fast, the short-to-medium term is likely more than enough time for Sun's customers' heads to be turned towards its competitors. This is a very fast-moving marketplace, and innovation has to be in evidence for any vendor wanting to avoid a slippery slope towards the Systems Supplier Graveyard.

Of course, Oracle's intention could be (as RedMonk's Cote among others have noted) to strip out Sun's hardware and sell it off - instead focusing on the software assets (Java, primarily). In which case it will hardly care about what happens to Sun's systems customers.

It's important to be balanced though.

With my optimistic hat on, I can see that there are nice things that could come out of this. Sun could effectively tick a box that Oracle probably has on a strategy document somewhere called "Cloud Computing strategy"; despite Larry Ellison's public dismissal of the hype, we all know that makes sense for Oracle to continue to move forward from its current position on Cloud. Sun's virtualisation, datacenter-in-a-box and nascent Cloud platform offerings, combined with the "integrated apps-to-disk" proposition Oracle and Sun talked briefly about today, could sow the seeds of a story that could bridge the interests of mainstream IT shops, leading-edge startups, ISVs and outsourcing providers.

At the moment, it's too early to tell – we'll have to wait until the summer, when the deal closes, to cast the runes again. Until then, let's get on with our lives. Now, what's on YouTube today?

Labels: acquisition, cloud computing, industry, Oracle, Sun

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 9:50 PM 0 comments permalink

ECM vendors collaborate on interoperability standard

Yesterday EMC, IBM, and Microsoft jointly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - a new specification designed to enable interoperability between content management repositories. The proposed standard, which was also being submitted to the open standards consortium OASIS yesterday, will create a common interface for accessing content stored in compliant repositories, simplifying the process of integrating business applications with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, particularly in a mixed environment with products from multiple ECM vendors - a situation that is common among enterprise organisations.

The core ECM focus areas for version 1.0 are collaborative content creation, and delivery of content through portals and mashups, with support for applications such as workflow/BPM, archiving, compound document management and electronic legal discovery to be built on top of the CMIS interfaces. The specification provides support for both REST- and SOAP-based interfaces.


The three primary parties in the development of the standard have been working on its development since 2006, and have since been joined by fellow competitors in the ECM space Alfresco, BEA/Oracle, OpenText and SAP.


I have to say that this is a welcome move by the ECM vendors - a standard of this kind is well overdue, and it is encouraging that so many of the leading players are on board. Clearly the implementation of such a (proposed) standard will not happen overnight - and approval of the standard by OASIS is not expected until the second half of 2009. However, we can expect the vendors involved to begin introducing CMIS-compliant code before then, especially since a key goal of the specification was to enable it to be developed as a layer that can sit on top of existing content repositories, rather than requiring them to be redeveloped from scratch (compared to the related JSR 170 standard, for example). In fact, the Alfresco website is already offering up its draft CMIS implementation for preview by the developer community.

A risk to the specification's success is that it falls into the same trap that befell the ANSI SQL standard. This provided a standard way of accessing data repositories, but allowed vendors to include their own "tweaks" which locked people in. The CMIS vendors acknowledge that CMIS is not trying to cover everything - for example security and administration is left to the individual applications - and clearly some products will have differentiating capabilities that are not covered by the standard, increasing the risk of deviation. However, despite this risk, CMIS is a positive step for the ECM market.


It is also worth noting that the standard has much wider implications than just ECM - certainly any organisations looking to implement collaboration technologies should keep an eye on the progress of the standard, and should also challenge their collaboration software providers on their plans, as CMIS should make it much easier to manage collaboratively authored content in the same way as any other organisational content.

Labels: Alfresco, CMIS, ECM, EMC, ibm, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, standards

posted by Angela Ashenden @ 4:57 PM 0 comments permalink

Software AG goes in an interesting direction for SOA governance

As part of yesterday's release of the latest iteration of its webMethods Insight product Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Progress Software. This announcement adds the Actional runtime SOA management and monitoring technology (which Progress acquired back in January 2006) to Software AG's existing Centrasite design-time governance capabilities (which were bolstered by the acquisition of Infravio in September 2006) and the runtime policy enforcement provided by its webMethods X-Broker and partner Layer 7's XML Firewall.

The incorporation of runtime SOA management and monitoring functionality into Insight is a necessary evolution of Software AG-webMethods integration strategy that we commented on just over a year ago. It's long been our position that SOA is more than a standards-based approach to software development and integration. The business value of a service-oriented initiative depends on a recognition that software services are experienced, just like their real-world analogues. The quality of that experience depends on a governance approach that extends throughout the service lifecycle, where the contracts defined when services are designed are subsequently enforced through policies once they are deployed and running - and where runtime metrics are captured to provide insight into the service level quality that is actually exeprienced. Furthermore, those metrics can be used to inform and support change management processes, so closing the SOA lifecycle loop.

Whilst the announcement doesn't come as any great surprise, the source of the runtime management and monitoring functionality does. When Oracle confirmed it's intention to acquire BEA, I said:

It [the acquisition] leaves some of the other bigger specialist players - TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering.

Software AG has gone to a potential competitor for the mantle of best-of-breed, specialist alternative to the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. If you had told me on Friday that Software AG was going to strike an OEM deal for SOA management and monitoring I'd have put my money on AmberPoint, which has historically been the OEM of choice for the likes of BEA and TIBCO.

I am not quite sure what to make of this decision. AmberPoint doesn't compete with Software AG directly and has established a healthy and growing customer base, as well as partnerships with some of the leading systems integrators - and a technology partnership with Software AG! Software AG's decision comes not long after Oracle's decision to drop AmberPoint. As we pointed out in our analysis of Oracle's roadmap for the BEA integration, we don't have any hard evidence for Oracle's claims that it had received negative feedback from BEA customers but it's something we will continue to explore. In light of the decision to go with Actional, it will be intriguing to see how the partnership evolves and how things pan out when Software AG and Progress are in a competitive situation.

This acquisition should be welcome news to Software AG customers that have invested in the company's SOA offerings as it will save them the time and effort of plugging the runtime governance gap that existed prior to the partnership. Those embarking on a significant SOA intiative should also give Software AG careful consideration, particularly if they are not wedded to one of the mega-platform providers.

Labels: AmberPoint, BEA, governance, ibm, Oracle, Progress, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO, webMethods

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 2:32 PM 6 comments permalink

If you want our take on where Oracle's taking BEA...

Read this new report.

I know we're not the quickest off the mark, but we wanted to get the whole team working together to author something comprehensive, and with travel and so on, that took a few days.

We'll admit to being pessimistic about BEA's prognosis going into the Oracle acquisition, but Oracle's early communications highlight its understanding of the strengths of the BEA technology, as well as of BEA's market footprint. What's more, the company is also openly committing to support BEA customers' existing working relationships and arrangements, and has pledged not to force product migration on any customer. There is more that Oracle needs to do, of course, but this is a good start.

Labels: BEA, MWD, Oracle

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 9:25 PM 0 comments permalink

IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy

Labels: BMC, CA, CardSpace, Eclipse, Higgins, HP, ibm, identity, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 8:54 AM 2 comments permalink

Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play

Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation to came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".

The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "never look a gift horse in the mouth"...

As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was - for Oracle - close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.

So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:

• Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today - Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.


• BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people,assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.


• Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002-05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.


• As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle - and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)

As an interesting footnote for analyst-watchers: at the end of the meeting, the Oracleists said they were "very keen to continue the dialogue". This was fantastic news, given MWD's status with Oracle! But what was behind that? Had they had some kind of road-to-damascus experience about the value of smaller analyst firms? Well, no... it turns out that Oracle's PR team is interested in talking to me as a "blogger" - but this is something separate from my work as an analyst for MWD. MWD is still in the same position as an analyst firm, and it seems I'll need to have a separate relationship with Oracle as an analyst. I'll leave an analysis of what this might mean for how Oracle perceives the relative value of "bloggers" and "analysts" (particularly in light of discussions like this one about what defines an analyst) as an exercise to the interested reader.

It's funny, though: last time I looked, I was just one person... it seems that getting collaboration and conversation right is indeed not about introducing new technology, but about adjusting your culture and organisation.

Labels: analyst biz, enterprise 2.0, Oracle

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 10:18 PM 0 comments permalink

The Mysterious Oracle

As part of my research into all things collaboration, not least through my development of our forthcoming continuous advisory service, I have regular briefings with software vendors to find out what they are doing. Usually vendors are more than pleased to brief us analysts - anything to build the profile of their company or products within the marketplace. It is odd, then, when a vendor refuses to brief you on something. That is the current position I find myself in with Oracle.

Oracle has had a stake in the ground in the collaboration market since 2003 with its Collaboration Suite, the latest version (which was released in 2005) including products for email and calendaring, instant messaging, team workspaces, web conferencing, unified messaging and discussions. It's also true that Oracle has a fair job on its hands integrating the Stellent content management software (which it acquired in November 2006) with its own technology. But with all the general hype around Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration in the market at the moment, combined with the high profile that its major competitors in this space - IBM and Microsoft - are maintaining, it is intriguing that Oracle (which does not usually shy away from PR opportunities) is keeping such a low profile.

Oracle is far from being a major competitor in this space, but with an existing offering on the table, it should be making more of an effort to catch up. Perhaps all this secrecy belies some imminent great announcement that will shake the market. But right now, all it is doing is lowering the market's confidence in its ability to deliver on the collaboration promise. Oracle needs to get its act together in collaboration, or it will miss the boat entirely.

Labels: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, Oracle

posted by Angela Ashenden @ 5:33 PM 0 comments permalink

BEA and Oracle and "caveat emptor"

As someone who wrote a little on the potential acquisition of BEA by Oracle, I've been in a quandary since the news of the acquisition broke: frankly, I felt that I needed to write something - but there was already so much other commentary out there (much of it saying the same thing), I didn't want to just add another voice to the global egosystem. (The perils of writing in the age of the web, I suppose.)

So I asked our excellent partners Freeform Dynamics if they could help us look behind the headlines - to understand what regular IT people out there think of the deal. As it happened, they'd already kicked off a quick research effort on that precise topic without me knowing. Great minds think alike.

Freeform conducted a quick poll of readers of The Register (this is a big multinational IT news site, and its readers are typically IT managers, developers and ops people - people at the coal face of enterprise IT). They asked a couple of high level questions:

• Is the acquisition of BEA by Oracle positive or negative for the IT industry?
• Will the acquisition of BEA by Oracle be positive or negative for your business specifically?

They also asked respondents to provide "free form" answers to provide reasoning for the answers to the two main questions. The Freeform guys got just under 300 responses overall. So what did people think?

Well, there were no real surprises in the response to the second ("what does it mean for you") question. There appears to be a large degree of nervousness amongst respondents who are BEA customers (this is bound to be true whenever a company buys something you've already made an investment in). In this group, around 40% were "unsure" and a further 35% or so felt the impact would be "negative". For the Oracle customers, things look a lot rosier: around 40% felt the impact would be "positive", and a further 35% or so thought the outcome would be "neutral". Given Oracle's standing as a middleware provider (the technology is good enough if you're working within an Oracle environment, but not regarded as top-tier for cross-enterprise use in a heterogeneous environment) it's understandable that Oracle customers are keen to get their hands on some more beefy middleware alternatives.

What was much more interesting to me were the responses to the first question, because they can't be explained away by understandable acquisition jitters.

When asked "is the acquisition positive or negative for the IT industry?" fewer than 30% of respondents felt the outcome would be positive (45% or so were negative, 10% or so were unsure, and 15% or so were neutral). Within the BEA customer base, two-thirds of respondents were negative - but given my earlier points about why people buy BEA, I'm not too surprised by that. Tellingly, though, even among respondents with no investment in BEA or Oracle, over 40% felt the outcome would be negative for the industry (around 35% were positive, just over 10% were neutral, and under 10% were unsure).

Looking at the respondents with Oracle investments and those with investments in both BEA and Oracle, both camps were decidedly ambivalent about the impact of the deal on the IT industry in general. In both cases, more respondents answered "negative" than "positive" on this question.

When we looked at the freeform responses supplementing the other questions, there was more food for thought.

The most common explanations for "negative" responses could be grouped into one common answer: "it'll lead to reduced choice in the market". Other popular comments can be summarised as concerns about the viability of existing investments (this was cited by both BEA and Oracle customers), and concerns about the potential loss of innovation within BEA's technology. Interestingly, the poll also threw up a significant number of respondents who were concerned about the degree of power that Oracle (after the BEA acquisition) would have over them as a customer.

There were, of course, freeform comments on the positive side (there were just fewer of them). The most popular positive responses could be best summarised as "a more mature solution will emerge". The second most popular category of positive response can best be summarised as "it'll enable the rescue of some good technology from a company that has lost its way".

Looking back over all this data (and a more comprehensive analysis will appear soon on The Register, courtesy of Freeform Dynamics), my message is this: whether you're the company buying BEA, or a company that has previously bought BEA technology, this shows the eternal truth of the phrase "caveat emptor".

If you've historically bought BEA technology because BEA was an independent middleware technology provider, the lesson is that just because your middleware supplier is independent today, doesn't mean it will be independent next year. If supplier independence at key points in your IT landscape is really important to your IT strategy, do a proper risk analysis and plan what you'll do if things change.

If you're an Oracle exec, the lesson is that many of the customers you're about to acquire might already be customers of yours - but they may well have bought BEA technology precisely to avoid getting too deeply attached to companies like yours. You're going to have to tread very carefully.

Labels: acquisition, BEA, Freeform Dynamics, Oracle, strategy planning

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 2:36 PM 0 comments permalink

Roles play a prominent role in identity management this week

Labels: Bridgestream, Eurekify, identity, Novell, Oracle, RBAC, Sun, Vaau

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 3:08 PM 0 comments permalink

Putting customers first?

Most readers will by now be familiar with the recent sparring between Oracle and BEA (just see our del.icio.us links over the past days to get an update if you're not up to speed). There's been plenty said about this already of course, but I thought it would be fun to look past the "industry insider" angle and consider what this piece of theatre says about the IT industry and what it means for the organisations that this industry sells to.

The original (publicly stated, but unsolicited) offer to purchase BEA came from Oracle on October 12th. It was surely no coincidence that after years of alleged courting by Oracle, the offer finally came once "activist investor" Carl Icahn had acquired a significant position as a BEA shareholder. Icahn started his BEA investment run-up in early September, and now owns around 13% of the stock. As part of his initial disclosure of stock purchase, Icahn's company stated that the purpose was to attempt to get BEA to sell itself in order to deliver more value to shareholders.

[Just to put some numbers on that "value", as mentioned here, if BEA had sold to Oracle for $17 a share, Icahn would have stood to make a $217.1m profit (that's roughly a 33% return on his $663.8m investment) in just a couple of months.]

Of course it's fair to argue that BEA has sometimes failed to capitalise on technology and business trends in ways that it might have done, and as a result its technology could deliver more. Icahn does have a point when he says that ISVs in general face an uncertain future as business models in the ICT industry change and value flows increasingly away from hardware and software (catalysed by open source and commodity hardware) and towards services.

But is Icahn's prescription for BEA (a sale) the right one? This article appraises Icahn's record and on that reading, he's certainly been far from infallible. For one minute, let's look past shareholder value in isolation, and consider the business that BEA is in.

BEA is a company that's built its business on being a middleware provider that can operate independently from the other technologies that middleware has to interoperate with - databases, desktop software, packaged applications, hardware, management consulting services, and so on. Indeed BEA has often said itself that its position is as "the Switzerland of enterprise software".

Not every medium or large organisation needs its middleware provider to be "Switzerland" of course. But in a large number of organisations, particularly financial services firms, telecoms providers and governments with extensive, decades-long IT legacies, there's sufficient heterogeneity to warrant building a strategic relationship with a supplier that can operate independently of all the other stuff and is less likely than others to favour one technology over another. This is a sound strategy based on sound policy (in other contexts, it's called separation of duties).

Many companies have built relationships with BEA precisely because it could offer them this kind of relationship. And middleware isn't like vacuum cleaners, or even airline seats: companies (particularly large companies) want long-term relationships with their middleware providers. If BEA is sold - to Oracle, or pretty much anyone else - those customers are going to have the rug pulled out from underneath them. Customers who made strategic IT bets on an independent middleware vendor will have to reappraise their investments and quite possibly spend a heap more money trying to either rejig their strategies, or build new relationships with new suppliers (although options for those wanting a slice of Swiss neutrality are limited: there are only two other software companies of any real size with similar positions - TIBCO and Software AG).

So - to get to the point: what's troubling me is that in the IT industry, there's often much hand-wringing about how poorly IT and IT vendors are perceived by businesses, and how everyone needs to work harder to build bridges and raise a positive profile of how IT (and IT vendors) can add value to organisations.

But if the IT industry continues to shuffle deckchairs in the name of shareholder value, to the detriment of customer value, can anyone be surprised when business wallets remain tightly controlled and IT staff, and vendors, are viewed with suspicion by the global community of business IT buyers? If Icahn wants BEA to become more competitive and deliver more value to shareholders, there are more ways to go about it than selling the company. It might be that those prescriptions take longer to kick in than Icahn's current favourite, though. That probably makes them less likely to be pursued.

Am I being hopelessly naive? Let me know your take. It would be good to start a bit of a debate here, I think.

Labels: BEA, industry, interoperability, Oracle

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 10:33 AM 1 comments permalink

Oracle proposes to buy BEA

Oracle today confirmed

that it delivered a letter to the Board of Directors of BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) on October 9 in which Oracle proposes to acquire BEA for $17.00 per share in cash. The $17.00 per share offer is a 25% premium over yesterday's closing price of $13.62.

This acquisition has been long-discussed so I can't say I find the news particularly surprising, particularly with Carl Icahn recently upping his stake in the company. I think this just makes it more likely that Oracle's proposal will be accepted.

This is primarily as a market share grab by Oracle. It does plug some gaps in the portfolio - particularly around business process management (based on BEA's Fuego acquisition), where Oracle only has basic BPEL web services orchestration; adds some telecoms vertical market capabilities to complement Oracle's vertical market push and the virtualisation work that BEA has done with the WebLogic Virtual Server Edition. Also, there's the opportunity for Oracle to tap into the healthy Tuxedo base. With a significant chunk of Oracle's profitability coming from maintenance, the revenue from BEA's customer base will suit its business far better than it did BEA which was suffering with its inability to grow license revenues.

This is yet another example of the bigger specialist players getting squeezed out by the industry goliaths - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP - and the open source, smaller best-of-breed players. SAP's recent acquisition of Business Objects is another example (although that did plug a few more gaps). It leaves some of the other bigger specialist players - TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering. On the other, though, taking market share for those customers from BEA is one thing: taking it from Oracle quite another. Ultimately, IBM is the big beneficiary in this regard.

In summary, then, I see: the acquisition going ahead; BEA's customers looking worried as they see themselves with an application-dependent infrastructure stack; IBM looking happy at the prospect of providing those customers with an application-independent alternative; the likes of TIBCO and Software AG pondering their options; and SAP and Microsoft carrying on in there own sweet way.

Labels: BEA, BPM, ibm, Microsoft, Oracle, Progress, Red Hat, SAP, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 4:57 PM 2 comments permalink

Microsoft's Dynamic IT: it's a start

Labels: HP, ibm, Microsoft, Oracle, SOA

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 10:22 AM 0 comments permalink

SAP plugs a significant gap - acquires MaXware

Labels: identity, MaXware, Oracle, Ping, SAP

posted by Neil Macehiter @ 5:45 PM permalink