Application integration takes center stage at OpenWorld |
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By Mark Brunelli, News Editor
13 Nov 2007 | SearchOracle.com |
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle president Charles Phillips showcased Oracle's integration, middleware and systems management products at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here yesterday, saying a key goal for the future is to provide customers with the tools they need to successfully and easily integrate Oracle and third-party applications.
But if it's not careful, Oracle could face a backlash from systems integrator firms, according to one IT industry analyst.
During his opening keynote address to thousands of OpenWorld attendees, Phillips said that customers can count on Oracle's Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Suite and Application Integration Architecture (AIA), a process integration framework unveiled earlier this year, for their integration needs going forward. AIA lets customers integrate application components through pre-built, industry-specific process integration packs provided by Oracle.
Phillips unveiled a handful of new Oracle products, including Oracle VM, which provides server virtualization on Linux, and the new process integration packs for Oracle AIA.
Oracle's new AIA Foundation Pack lets users access Oracle objects, services and infrastructure components so that they can build business processes that call on multiple applications. The company also introduced three new process integration packs for the communications industry.
"[Our product strategy] is to get more complete," Phillips said, "and at the same time, let us do the integrating for you and do that in a way that's open so you can extend it."
For Oracle -- which has purchased 41 companies over the past 45 months, including CRM giants Siebel Systems Inc. and PeopleSoft Corp. -- providing customers with integration capabilities is important, one expert says, particularly if the vendor wants to make good on its Apps Unlimited pledge to continue supporting customers who use older versions of the acquired applications. Oracle plans to combine the "best" components of its acquisitions in a new service-enabled applications platform called Oracle Fusion but has repeatedly said it won't force customers to upgrade.
"They have to build these integration capabilities in order to make Apps Unlimited work and sell additional modules," said Ray Wang, a principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "If you can't integrate the acquisitions, then they do not achieve the synergies."
Oracle's plan to simplify integration is cunning, Wang said, since it can point to AIA's pre-packaged integrations as a cost-effective alternative to time consuming integration projects conducted with the help of systems integrator firms.
But Oracle could face a backlash from its systems integrator partners if those firms can't replace revenue lost to AIA with additional -- if less time consuming -- integration projects, he explained.
"One way for Oracle to mitigate this risk is to have system integrators build out process integration packs on their own and extensions to AIA," Wang said.
Another challenge for Oracle, he said, is getting those pre-packaged process integration packs just right for the industries they serve.
"Industry process standards may change how business processes are codified," Wang explained. "Oracle has to get the level of process granularity right and the right level of semantic information by industry. This requires a good level of coordination among major industry heavyweights."
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