Look Back in Ingres 2

[Updated]

In my earlier post Look Back in Ingres I discussed Mark Barrenechea, who moved from Oracle to Ingres via Computer Associates (CA). Ingres has been spun off from CA, and is now funded by Garnett & Helfrich.

The latest issue of Business Week (Sweet Revenge, January 22, 2007) has a lot more back-story about Terry Garnett himself. Garnett, a former senior vice president at Oracle, had sworn revenge on Larry Ellison after being fired. Hence the drive to recruit loads of ex-Oracle people.

Fake Steve Jobs is sarcastic: "Here's to you, Terry Garnett, O master of revenge! O skillful manipulator of the press!"

The popular press (and joke websites) like to depict this kind of corporate battle in personal terms, and there may well be an element of truth in this case. But this is not just a battle between two individuals.

The Business Week story describes Ingres as a startup, but this is misleading. Although its corporate vehicle has been reconstituted, Ingres itself has a long history of rivalry with Oracle. Indeed, they started at around the same time with almost identical names. Oracle (founded 1977) was once Relational Software Inc; Ingres (founded 1980) was originally Relational Technology Inc. Ingres was less commercially successful than Oracle, and was acquired by Computer Associates in 1994.

So there is an element of corporate revenge here as well. Is the new Ingres likely to do serious damage to the old Oracle? I somehow doubt it; the old Oracle faces many challenges, but Ingres probably isn't the biggest threat at present.


The Ambassadors of Agamemnon Visiting Achilles 1801. (By the painter Ingres of course.) Achilles sulked a lot, because he didn't get the rewards he thought he deserved. He'd have gone down a treat in Silicon Valley.

Wikipedia: Ingres (database), Ingres (painter), Oracle (database company)
Technorati Tags: CA Computer Associates Ingres Oracle

The O'Reilly Code

Following the expensive lawsuit in which the authors of The Holy Grail sued the authors of the Da Vinci Code for a series of mysterious similarities between two texts ...

[BBC News: Court Ruling, Stakeholder Reaction, Legal Reaction]

... the O'Reilly gang is [update: was] threatening to set the lawyers on another Irish gang daring to trespass on the sacred turf of Web 2.0.

[Tom Raftery, Bill de hÓra, O'Reilly response]

In the case of the Da Vinci case, the cost of the lawyers was probably justified by the extra publicity for both books. Even if the Da Vinci book is rubbish (and I haven't read it, so I can't comment), the court case adds to the mystique.

But is the same true of Web 2.0?

Hey, perhaps I should sue Gartner and Oracle for borrowing SOA 2.0 (which I proposed in October 2005), and turning a sensible idea into a ridiculous one. See my SOA 2.0 fightback.

Oracle BI

Another briefing on Service-Oriented Business Intelligence (SOBI), this time from Oracle.

Oracle was keen to tell me about the integrated platform for SOA and BI - bundled together from all the products they've acquired recently. (Some analysts have criticized this bundling as Frankenstein, but I tend to agree with Radovan Janacek (Systinet) that this wiring-together is a perfectly valid use (nay, validation) of the power of SOA.)

Oracle is sceptical of all the flavours of BI - real-time BI, operational BI, and so on. Why not just BI? The focus of innovation for Oracle is doing BI better - and they don't seem particularly interested in changing the nature of BI functionality, nor extending its use to new domains. Oracle sees the primary value of SOA in allowing customers to deliver BI functionality more quickly and cheaply.

As a database vendor, Oracle sees the primary challenges of BI as technical ones - the growth and complexity in the quantities and sources of data, and the demands of speed. Moving data into a separate store for BI purposes is often more trouble than it's worth - so the preferred approach nowadays is to deliver all the BI functionality from the database itself. (Obviously Oracle still supports data warehousing as well.) Which means that Oracle is obliged to put a great deal of emphasis on performance and speed. For example, they quote some impressive improvements in the speed of generating OLAP cubes, from several hours to a few minutes.

One of the possible advantages of SOA is that BI functionality can be accessed in new ways. To start with, BI results can be distributed in various ways - via the Oracle portal, or via the collaboration suite. And Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be configured to respond to predefined BI events, such as KPI range checks. This is a useful step towards fully integrated BI.

Oracle is not yet convinced about the need to support subscription technologies such as RSS/Atom; this would probably be achieved via the portal as well. But the portal approach works best if BI enquiries are predefined, or at least controlled centrally. BI results are generally in the form of relational data - for example, sets of KPIs, or segmented files of customers. This implies a top-down architecture of BI usage, which looks okay for the kind of organization where human intelligence (in particular advanced analytical skill) is assumed to be concentrated at head office, but seems quite unsuitable for the power-to-the-edge organization.

But SOA may allow broader access to BI functionality - not just the results of predefined BI enquiries but the ability to invoke dynamic BI, rendered as web services. And fully collaborative BI requires not just sharing the BI results, but sharing the BI process. So for example instead of doing the segmentation centrally and distributing a segmented customer file, you might distribute the segmentation algorithm so that (a) it may be applied locally and dynamically, (b) it may be customized locally, and (c) local refinements and improvements can themselves be disseminated.

Oracle is starting to look at extending the SOA-friendly aspects of BI, and I hope we can expect greater support for some of these issues in the next generation of the Oracle platform. No dates or details announced yet.

CBDI report on Service-Oriented Business Intelligence (October 2005)
See also: Oracle Business Intelligence Blog
Technorati Tags: BI business intelligence Oracle SOA

From Oracle to SOA Governance

Consolidation: Oracle acquires Siebel

Oracle's acquisition of Siebel (together with its previous acquisition of PeopleSoft) is attracting a great deal of interest. Some stakeholders and observers have made interesting comparisons. 

 

§	Oracle is the new Computer Associates	Marc Benioff (SalesForce.com)
§	Oracle is the new Microsoft	Dana Blankenhorn (ZDNet), Paul Roberts (eWeek)

 

Both of these statements need to be taken sceptically in my view; each large IT company has its own style of acquisition, its own style of managing (and possibly integrating) its expanding product portfolio. 

Nicholas (Does IT Matter?) Carr comments on the duality of this event: consolidation and disruption. At one level, enteprise software becoming a mature commodity ripe for consolidation; at a higher level enterprise solutions becoming decomposed and recomposed according to SOA principles. See also commentary by Dan Farber (ZDnet). 

 

Disruption: Salesforce

If there is to be disruption, the business model being promoted by SalesForce.com seems like a good candidate. A number of commentators (see above) have been convinced by Marc Benioff's bullish statements at DreamForce (the SalesForce.com conference). However E. Schwartz (InfoWorld TechWatch) posts a sceptical note. The key question here is whether large corporate users will be willing to rely upon a smaller service provider, and how long can SalesForce.com remain independent. (Many commentators have been unable to resist speculating about a possible future acquisition of SalesForce.com; and it is always fun to imagine various win-win permutations.)

 

Asymmetric Rationalization

Industry consolidation involves a form of supply-side rationalization: rationalization of the vendor by the vendor for the vendor. Of course, acquisition is only the first step of this process. There are various possible outcomes in terms of the consolidation of sales and marketing, the consolidation of brands, the consolidation of underlying technologies, components and platforms. Large software companies are generally trying to get a good balance between extracting maximum revenue from cash-cow software products and/or services, and developing new markets for new products/services. 

Meanwhile, large corporate users are also under pressure to rationalize their IT provision - to achieve maximum economies and value-for-money while continuing to support the complex and changing IT requirements of the business. 

The relationship between these two rationalization processes is a complex one. While there are some obvious conflicts of interest, there are also many opportunities for collaboration: between vendors, between users, as well as across the vendor-user divide. OpenSource and ApplicationExchange (which Nicholas Carr sees as a reincarnation of IBM SHARE) can both be regarded as forms of sociotechnical collaboration. 

 

SOA Governance

Which somehow brings us to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

James Governor (Redmonk) suggests that the Oracle consolidation provides a trigger for user organizations to sort out IT governance - as a defence against the growing monopoly power of Oracle. Perhaps now is the time to sort out your relationships across the IT vendorspace, sort out your platform and procurement strategy. This is the user side of vendor rationalization. 

Radovan Janecek (Systinet) (SOAG Starting Point, Ultimate Vision of SOA) explains why this is an SOA governance issue and not just an IT governance issue. The bones of his argument are like this: business goals ... IT services ... reuse ... trust ... contract ... control ... metadata. And for Joe McKendrick (ZDNet), SOA provides a vision of independence from any single vendor. 

At one level, standardization on a product or platform ties you to a specific vendor or vendor community. Software monoculture carries significant risk - both because it increases the likely impact of any security breaches, and because it may foreclose some forms of innovation. However, if you can standardize the interfaces at the right level, you may be able to combine software economies with requisite variety and software biodiversity. Doing this properly is a complex architectural trick, but if it is achieved it provides a great argument for SOA. 

The big picture is broader than a single organization. While large organizations will need internal SOA governance, they will also increasingly need to participate in external SOA-based collaborations. There are two kinds of interoperability involved - endo-interoperability (within a single enterprise) and exo-interoperability - and therefore at least two kinds of SOA governance. 

For more on SOA Governance, please look at my article on Metropolis and SOA Governance. written with Philip Boxer and published in the Microsoft Architecture Journal. We are currently working on a sequel, in which we will illustrate the concepts of endo-interoperability and exo-interoperability, and explore their implications for structure, process and organization. Any discussion would be most welcome.

Software Pricing

A few weeks ago, an article in the Economist (July 14th 2005) set the software industry buzzing about new business models for software, and given new impetus to discussions of Software as a Service (SaaS).

I did a short piece on service economics for the CBDI Forum (July 20th). Other industry analysts who have commented on this include Britton Manasco (July 15th, August 5th), Phil Wainewright (July 21st) and Sadagopan (August 7th).

The Economist article has been widely read by senior management in the software industry, and there have already been some high-level responses. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems sees this argument as a further justification for Open Source – which is of course merely a more sophisticated form of Input-Based Pricing. He looks forward to a world in which software is free. This business model obviously suits those software companies (such as IBM) that make significant amounts of revenue from hardware and/or services.

Meanwhile, Oracle is drawing attention to its experiments in Output-Based Pricing. In a recent interview published in News.Com (July 22nd), Oracle President Charles (Chuck) Phillips stated that "We'd love to get to a mode where we're looking at the number of employees served, the number of checks processed – you name it, some business metric – and take it out of the technology realm and tie our success to their success in terms of business."

In these statements, there is a certain amount of confusion about input-based, output-based and value-based pricing. Even in the software industry, it's hard to imagine that business success is measured by the number of checks processed. (Does Phillips know how many checks the Oracle accounts department processed last month? Does he care?)

Specialist service provider LeCayla offers software companies a managed way of converting to output-based pricing. Software producers embed some coded service calls into the software, which securely pass a defined set of usage statistics from the customer's computer to the LeCayla server. Essentially, this allows a software producer to implement a software meter – which can be based on either input measures or output measures. It also supports policy-based charging, and allows software management on the consumer side to set rules for the utilization of the software. (Rules and policies are written in a LISP-like language, which provides some scope for complexity in their composition.) Although LeCayla has a long-term vision of value-based pricing, it is currently supporting Output-Based Pricing as a step in the right direction.

When I spoke to Conor Halpin of LeCayla about the benefits of metered software, he was eloquent about the possibilities of cost containment and increased control offered to the consumer side. At present, however, LeCayla itself charges the software producer side for its services.

The trouble is that from the software producer side of the fence there may be no compelling reason to switch from input-based pricing to output-based pricing, and there is undoubtedly going to be continued resistance from those software producers who see their traditional revenues threatened by thinking of Software as a Service. Just as many software producers appear to have succumbed to Open Source only after concerted pressure from large institutional users, so we may expect much of the push towards Software as a Service to come from the same quarters.


Related posts Value-Based Pricing (August 2005), Software Pricing at CA (September 2005)

Oracle Collaxa BPEL

I looked at Collaxa’s BPEL product a while back, and was quite impressed by their take on web service orchestration. So I noted with interest the recent rumours (now verified) of an acquisition by Oracle.

As with any merger and acquisition activity in the software industry, the outcome will be uncertain for some time. To what extent will the identity of the Collaxa innovation and team be preserved or swallowed up; to what extent will BPEL now achieve broader dissemination, across Oracle’s customer and beyond; how successful will Oracle be at integrating BPEL with the rest of its products and services; how does this help Oracle’s cause in the platform wars?

The early indicators are favourable. The announcement and launch seems to have been managed well, and the preliminary marketing material is falling into place. However, the first real indication will come with the next round of product releases, the next round of sales figures, and the next set of project success stories.