SOA Suite rated by analysts

As my focus moved in the last decade from BizTalk to webMethods to SAP PI to nowadays Oracle integration it's interesting for me to see how Oracle's SOA Suite is positioned by analyst firms. Of course the evaluation of Oracle's position is based on the functionality provided by the Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11gR1 family of products, as the 10g version is at it's end, especially 10.1.3.4 [ref: note ID 1128203.1]:

This document intends to inform customers using SOA Suite 10.1.3.4.x components about the forthcoming end of the error correction period after August 31st, 2010

Let's see what Gartner says, Gartner uses magic quadrants to position the competing players in a specific technology market. Based on the Completeness of vision and Ability to execute Gartner rates vendors as Challengers, Leaders, Visionaries and Niche players. The main magic quadrant I looked at is Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects, dated October 2010. The same month Gartner also published three other magic quadrants where Oracle 11g was evaluated: Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA-Style Application Projects, Business Process Management Suites and Shared SOA Interoperability Infrastructure Projects. In all these magic quadrants Oracle is positioned as a leader.

SOA Suite strengths:

• Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) is a large and fast-growing business that positions Oracle as the second-largest application infrastructure middleware vendor in the market. The technology is supported by a vast network of partners, and thousands of organizations in virtually every geography and in multiple vertical industries have successfully deployed the current or previous versions of OFM, in a large number of cases to support large and business-critical application integration scenarios.
• Synergies with large Oracle DBMSs and packaged application businesses could potentially create plenty of opportunities for cross-selling OFM technologies to support application integration projects.
• OFM provides a comprehensive, integrated, and feature-rich application infrastructure offerings, also providing leading technologies to support application integration requirements.
• The OFM road map addresses key integration technologies (e.g., more-powerful mapping and transformation and new unified adapter architecture) and emerging requirements (e.g., support for integration of mobile applications).

SOA Suite cautions:

• The relentless pace of Oracle's acquisitions in the packaged applications and application integration middleware markets (e.g., BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems and AmberPoint) requires further technology integration work, and poses migration and upgrade challenges for preacquisition product users.
• Despite significant adoption, the OFM 11gR1 product set requires more proof points about its use in complex and large-scale, real-life deployments.
• Oracle's campaign management features are weak. Oracle doesn't offer integration as a service, although it has partnerships in place for this market.
• The migration path from prior-generation application integration technologies coming from acquisitions to the strategic Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 is still onerous for some clients.
• Some Oracle clients are experiencing licensing and pricing issues when upgrading from previous versions to SOA Suite 11gR1, due to the change in the underlying application server (from Oracle Internet Application Server to Oracle WebLogic Suite) that may imply higher licensing costs.

Let's take a look at another analyst firm, Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester evaluated 15 leading comprehensive integration solution (CIS) vendors against 137 criteria that reflect the requirements of application development and delivery professionals. This resulted in the Forrester Wave: Comprehensive Integration Solutions (CIS) dated November 2010:

Oracle delivers a well-integrated CIS solution. Oracle has been identified as a Leader. The Oracle solution, which enables rapid development of integration-related functionality, includes Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite as its key components. The vendor has the secondlargest base of CIS customers (approximately 6,000) and has consistently achieved leadership status in this software category over the past five years. Oracle achieved very strong scores in four out of five product evaluation areas (architecture, integration server, application development framework, and business process management) and achieved an above-average score for its B2B features.

So the Oracle SOA Suite 11g is both by Gartner as well as by Forrester rated as a leader, that's nice. I wonder how the 10g version would have been rated by them...

As I migrated a few integrations from 10g to 11g I can say that such a migration is pretty much doable, the 11g Weblogic server is straight-forward and easy to use, at least compared to the 10g version. Just take some time to learn about the MDS (MetaData Service), it's like a version management system used all accross the platform and that you can use to share common artifacts at design and runtime. This MDS is a huge improvement, just like the central GUI with the whole integration scenario in one single overview instead of divided over the BPEL and ESB consoles. When migrating the components plan some time to clean up the sourcecode as well, by deleting obsolete files and applying advancing insights and new best practices that were not known at the time of the original developments.

Just one small point of attention when migrating the AIA EBO library (Enterprise Business Object). The AIA EBO customizations (every EBO has a custom xsd file for your own customizations) should be upgrade-safe, that's the whole purpose of these custom xsd's. But some have been extended by Oracle in 11g. A few AIA 11g custom xsd files contain more types than were present in AIA v2.5, thus in a migration the following files should be merged manually: CustomCommonComponents.xsd, CustomCustomerPartyEBO.xsd and CustomSalesOrderEBO.xsd.

As I mentioned Gartners Magic quadrant and Forresters Wave, here they are:

Gartner:[Click to enlarge]

Forrester:[Click to enlarge]

Multi-tenancy

After visiting the Cloud Forum a few weeks ago [ref: cloud forum 2011] I remained with the question what multi-tenancy actually means. Multi-tenancy is a relatively new software architecture principle in the realm of the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. It allows to make full use of the economy of scale, as multiple customers - "tenants" - share the same application and database instance. All the while, the tenants enjoy a highly configurable application, making it appear that the application is deployed on a dedicated server. The major benefits of multi-tenancy are increased utilization of hardware resources and improved ease of maintenance resulting in lower overall application costs. [ref: Multi-Tenant SaaS Applications: Maintenance Dream or Nightmare? (pdf), a report by Cor-Paul Bezemer and Andy Zaidman].

Basically multi-tenancy is the only proven SaaS delivery architecture that eliminates many of the problems created by the traditional software licensing and upgrade model, so it’s extremely valuable to know whether the cloud provider uses a multi-tenant architecture. Multi-tenancy ensures that every customer is on the same version of the software, the 1 in 0 - 1 - ∞: 0 investments, 1 version, ∞ scalability. See also the following whitepaper [ref: 10 Critical Requirements (pdf)].

As said before multi-tenancy results in lower overall application costs, together with the dramatic drop of infrastructure costs over the last five years the price is basically the main reason why everyone is now so convinced Cloud Computing will work.
Factors for driving companies toward the Cloud are

• Cost-savings - smaller in-house IT staff, less software licensing, less hardware and having an easy and inexpensive way to store a redundant copy of their data.
• Ease of management, customers no longer have to worry about software upgrades, hardware upgrades, migrations, or any of the management that comes with running a datacenter.

Barriers preventing some companies from moving to the Cloud are

• Trust - if a company loses it's data, it is very likely that this company will go out of business.
• Losing their IT staff - many companies see their IT staff as a competitive advantage against other competitors in their field.
• Lack of knowledge about Cloud Computing.

Basically Cloud Computing is not just the next step, but more a paradigm shift. To illustrate this a quote from the book The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr:

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

Updated November 6, 2012 with the proper reference to the used definition of multi-tenancy.