The South East Asia SOA Weblog

My company has been an Amberpoint partner for a couple of years. We have been committed to this product set for SOA Governance for a while now. Disappointingly, Oracle has just announced that they will acquire Amberpoint. As usual Oracle are upbeat about this but you have to start wondering how healthy this is for the IT industry as a whole as the resultant industry after all these acquisitions fundamentally offers customers and systems integrators far less choice regarding the business relationships they need in order to deploy the solution sets they desire. There is also a far broader issue regards the stifling innovation in our industry.

I put it to you and Oracle that smaller, focused and more agile companies like Amberpoint are able to specialize and innovate faster. Behemoths such as Oracle, IBM and HP find it far more difficult to innovate outside their traditional areas of core expertise as they are just not tuned into investing time and resources that way. There is only one beneficiary for this type of acquisition and that is the company making the acquisition. I am convinced that it is not good for customers, integrators or the industry as a whole. Most of the products aquired by the these companies just stagnate after the acquisition (I could cite many many examples of this including most of the 60 odd companies Oracle has acquired over the past 5 years).

Acquisitions of this nature are simply opportunistic, funded with debt and aimed at make rich companies more powerful; and controlling thus disadvantaging the smaller players. This won’t be the first time a corporate software company acquisition has cost me dearly (the other two were NetBeans and Star Office… which incidentally are both now owned by Oracle after the Sun acquisition). Oracle’s web site has a letter for Partners. Unfortunately it only talks about Oracle partners (http://www.oracle.com/amberpoint/partner-letter.html) and does not mention anything about the existing Amberpoint partners which I think is a little careless of them (characteristically).

It appears that the center of innovation in the IT industry at present seems to be the open source companies. Let’s hope that trend continues and isn’t stifled in the same way.

Some would have us believe that consolidation is good for the IT industry. I find that kind of hard to stomach as it really means less choice for consumers at the end of the day. Interestingly there has been very little backlash over Oracle’s intent to purchase Sun. There is so much at stake with this acquisition for the IT industry and business not just Open Source. Sun currently controls several key technologies and Open Source products one of which is MySQL but others such as OpenSSO are also valuable contributions to the community. There is quite a long list… foremost on that list is Java. The industry needs a trustworthy custodian for Java. I really hope that we are getting that with Oracle (assuming the deal will be approved).I was amazed at how fast the US approved the deal. There probably should have been a lot more scrutiny on this as it does represent a large shift in the power structure around Java and other technologies. Sun have been a benevolent and kind force driving Java to where it is today.
So what will be left of Java and MySQL when the Sun goes down?

In my day I have used many and varied data integration products and approaches. Obviously all of the solutions have various strengths and weaknesses. We have recently started using Talend Open Studio for data integration(www.talend.com). The depth and breadth of this suite is incredible for open source. Talend it brings a whole new dimension to the solution space and rivals any commercial product suite. As with most data integration tools, Talend provides the ability to map the process from a diagram perspective down to the specific mappings and various adapters to accomplish ETL tasks. The design of the tool has been well thought through and resulted in the most flexible and powerful data integration tool set i have used. Talend also has a great capability for building jobs and deploying them as packages that can be run as autonomous Java or PERL and/or deployed as Axis Web Services (can be consumed by any ESB of course) or into the jBoss ESB.

Here is a shot of the debugging panel

In short, there is way to much to describe here. Check it out for yourself or consult with us for advice in deployment.

This is just to let readers of the blog know that IASA (International Association of Software Architects) Indonesia Chapter now has a mailing list operational on Yahoo Groups. As per my earlier post there is also a Facebook Group (intended for the social side). IASA Indonesia would like to use the Yahoo Group iasa_indo@yahoogroups.com for all mailing list communications. All of you practicing architects in Indonesia please feel free to join our chapter and enjoy the benefits.

The solutions now offered in Open Source for implementing SOA have begun to provide extensive value but customers and systems integrators should be cautious and think strategically when assessing the value of these solutions. Projects such as WS02 and semi-open source (non-GPL, non-BSD, non-Apache) solutions such as Intalio BPMS are now comparable and even superior to many or even all their closed source counterparts. Considering some of the open source licenses offered by vendors it is necessary to take a cautious and well informed approach to open source offerings. Many of these solutions are contrived contributions that do not have a strong 3rd party developer community and are principally developed by one vendor with the dubious goal of proliferating their software and gaining the mind-share of the broader developer community. In my opinion the strategic focus of customers seeking open source solutions should be on those open source vendors licensing completely open and community driven software licenses along with support and subscription based licensing. In general customers should be cautions of vendors offering so called open source or community editions and a so called closed source enterprise edition. Watch this space for updates.