Oracle Scores Big with SOA Suite 11g Release

| Jul 3, 2009 | Application Infrastructure | Competitive Intelligence Report

| Analyst: Michael Meehan

Current Perspective: Very Positive
Vendor Importance: Very High
Market Impact: Very High

Event Summary

July 1, 2009 – As part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch, Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Suite 11g. New capabilities inside this modular suite include a native SCA designer, integration of CEP, multi-dimensional BPM, centralized governance and security policies, and cross-application, end-to-end instance tracking.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Very positive on Oracle’s release of its SOA Suite 11g, which fully rationalizes the vendor’s 2008 acquisition of BEA and pushes the envelope for high performance in the SOA space. The SOA Suite is part of the general release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and forms the backbone of Oracle’s modular, agile middleware strategy. With this release Oracle has positioned itself to advance its market share significantly, and issues a stern challenge to IBM in the SOA space.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Oracle, because it has completed its trek from being a late entrant in the SOA market to being a clear market leader. Oracle can no longer be positioned as a vendor whose middleware solutions are only designed to improve the accessibility of its packaged applications. It has a complete application infrastructure platform that can stand up against any competitor.

• Market Impact: Very high on the entire application infrastructure market, because Oracle’s SOA Suite 11g upgrade encompasses application integration, business process management and governance. Oracle has a broad, modular, standards-compliant SOA offering that is targeted toward users building out high volume business services. In fact, certifying interoperability with SOA Suite 11g will become an imperative for many small and medium sized vendors in the application infrastructure market.

CLIENTS ONLY

Current Perspective

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Application Infrastructure | More information

Recommended Competitor Actions

• IBM should press its current appliance advantage in the SOA performance battle it is fighting with Oracle to win customers building high volume services. It should also position its WebSphere products as better able to deliver incremental improvements in heterogeneous environments than Oracle, which is emphasizing its platform might in 11g. Most large enterprises have both WebSphere and Fusion deployed, nullifying any sort of platform advantage.

• Microsoft needs to beat Oracle to the punch in delivering a virtualized, highly interoperable middleware stack. Since Microsoft announced its supposedly game-changing and still unfinished Oslo application modeling initiative in late 2007, Oracle has acquired BEA and upgraded its entire middleware portfolio while seamlessly integrating the two product lines. Virtualization represents the next frontier in the middleware market and Microsoft would do well to get there first.

• Software AG and Progress should promote the standalone might of their ESBs and position Oracle Service Bus as overly reliant on the rest of the Oracle SOA Suite and other Oracle solutions like Coherence to deliver meaningful performance gains.

• SAP must decide whether it wants to compete against Oracle in the middleware space. If so it must acquire an established vendor in the space such as TIBCO. Thanks to the successful absorption of BEA, the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g platform offers modularity, performance and a breadth of functionality SAP NetWeaver cannot match.

• MuleSource should tout Oracle’s attempts to market the combined capabilities of its ESB and Coherence as validation of the recent high availability partnership between MuleSource and GigaSpaces (see MuleSource Teams with GigaSpaces to Build New High Availability ESB, April 17, 2009).

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• IT shops looking to build highly scalable, low latency services should consider Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Oracle has made high performance a priority in this release and can add in associated technologies like JRockit and Coherence to boost performance even further.

• Users should not view Oracle Enterprise Manager as a replacement for existing systems management solutions or Oracle Web Services Manager as an enterprise SOA management solution. Both are primarily focused on managing Oracle middleware infrastructure, which is important for customers with large Oracle installments, but Oracle is not a competitive standalone management vendor.

• Customers interested in SOA Suite 11g should evaluate how well it works with existing enterprise BPM solutions. Third party BPM products may not plug neatly into Oracle’s unified, SCA-based composition environment. Oracle’s BPM-SOA integration forms a powerful solution and other BPM systems will not be able to leverage all of the advanced functionality of the SOA Suite.

• IT shops using the Oracle Service Bus should strongly consider adding the vendor’s CEP engine in order to help compose and run dynamic services. CEP represents a quick path to tackling specific business challenges in conjunction with the common assembly, orchestration and integration capabilities of an ESB and Oracle has built compelling synergy between its ESB and CEP solutions.

Current Perspective

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Application Infrastructure | More information

Top