Thursday, October 20, 2005

A message from the twilight zone

Normally Jason Bloomberg speaks for ZapThink in the real world. However, his latest comments about Oracle's Fusion middleware are definitely from another reality.

To call it Frankenstein shows a strange lack of understanding about how large middleware offerings really develop. I can't put my finger on a single one (including IBM's) that has been entirely developed in-house and from scratch. These things develop in leaps and bounds as requirements change. As companies acquire other companies, it's also inevitable that some kind of cross-pollination will occur. But to suggest that it's not uniform or cohesive in some way is very strange indeed. Maybe he just had an off day?

It's also the case that this kind of evolution rather than revolution approach happens throughout the industry. Many large organisations we've come across, have grown by acquisition and are forced to leverage all of their infrastructural investments simply because they can't afford to migrate to a homogeneous environment. That's where SOA and Web Services really come into play these days.

Now whether IBM will see Oracle as a threat in this space is a different matter.

Note also that Frankenstein was trying to advance science and defeat death. Not such a bad goal!

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