This note follows the post on Fusion Apps Launch announcement. There were a slew of announcements from Oracle this Open World 2010 and Larry said few times that Oracle has launched so much this week like never before in the history of the company. I spent time at the Oracle Open World conference talking to partners, customers, oracle teams and fellow influencers and found that in general the mood was positive and Oracle was trying to move things forward. The tagline hardware and software engineered together was resonating quite a bit in the variety of announcements made in the meet . Oracle’s integrated hardware and software systems approach is a major step forward and brings an element of twist to the data center game. I want to quickly look at the core ideas, rationale and benefit of the integrated appliance model, the impact of Exadata and Exalogic, the new Fusion suite, and an early view of what could be coming next.
Oracle Fusion Apps – Giant Leap? : Integration, Simpicity, Ease of Use, Flexibility are the key advantages touted by Oracle. The first set of apps encompass 7 big modules of fusion apps – Financial Management, HCM, Sales and Marketing, Project Portfolio management, SCM, PROCUREMENT & GRC . A good spread so to say, Oracle claims that these modules have within themselves, 5000 TABLES, 20000 VIEW OBJECTS, 10000 BUSINESS PROCESSES , 2500 APP MODULES – no doubt a mammoth effort. An Oracle engineer told me 8000 plus engineers worked for several years to get this out – truly a massive engineering effort. Oracle showed a good demo of Fusion Apps in action integrating a variety of business processes. The demo showed Fusion Apps having good clean UI with modern look and feel with lots of embedded activity stream.
Apparently, these modules were simultaneously tested with select customers while getting developed and Oracle says extensive efforts went behind optimizing the screens, workflows and functionalities. The key thing here is that the Fusion Apps platform leverages standard middleware and oracle says no proprietary language is involved. By using Java as the development standard, Oracle seems to have pushed the platform become lot more easy to adopt and Oracle highlighted that competition ranging from SAP to Salesforce.com insists on using proprietary languages to develop on their respective platforms. Such a middleware support makes it possible to connect easily with SAP and any other enterprise system and the emphasis here is that the ease come from the fact that everything is web service enabled. All these confirm the fact that Oracle is one of the few vendors to completely rebuild its apps, BI, and middleware from scratch though their stand on multitenancy is not clear as of today. It’s a major step forward to see that all models of cloud - Public, private, hybrid, on premise are fully supported with facilitated help to move easily across these clouds. Fusion Apps, the long-awaited next iteration of the company’s application suite, will begin shipping to customers in CY1Q11, but the full vision is likely still a couple of years from reality( as in fully blown implementations)
I did spend a lot of time looking at the new set of fusion apps - HCM to CRM to SCM etc.. Oracle is claiming embedded collaboration inside Fusion apps and what I saw therein was an integrated social layer built inside, engineered to share and use the profile information tied to identity management and leading onto analytics. The standard features that we see in terms of begin able to synthesise information based on social profiles, initiate loose form of collaboration like chat, VoIP are now integral inside Fusion Apps. The in-speak, in-context enablement was certainly there inside the apps. This may run contrary to purist form of social collaboration but context is a powerful element in the collaboration mix and coupled with enterprise objectives of easing communications amongst stakeholders make this a powerful enterprise collaboration enabler. The product has good social networking inside the ECM product with support for activity streams and features like integration with Microsoft Outlook to support threaded conversations, document level collaborations etc, ability to have linkages with non Oracle apps through social networks signify important advancements therein. Fusion apps is stepping up to behave and act like an enterprise collaboration infrastructure for Apps users and this is SIGNIFICANT advancement in and of itself.
Collaboration inside Fusion apps looks very powerful – mirroring SAP’s streamworks, it provides context based social conversation possible. The real-time and intelligent collaboration inise Fusion Apps is designed to operate around ‘conversations’ as the primary social object, it works as a central engagement utility in the enterprise that can be triggered from anywhere – natively or (soon) from other applications. Oracle executives told me that this extends to provide a lightweight collaboration feature such as tagging and annotating digital assets , analytics integration With light collaboration features such as annotation on digital assets, multimedia support (like video, voice), this will prove to be very useful inside enterprises. It appears to me that Oracle’s goal was to be best amongst the enterprise players in the social and collaborative space (ignoring the stand alone best of breed players) and they seem to have achieved their objectives here. If these go into their customer’s enterprise, we will see significant usage and extensions
With the launch of Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle now has an integrated, purpose-built machine for data warehousing, OLTP, (Exadata) and application server middleware workloads. The key things to note is that when Fusion Apps rolls out early year, they will also run on Exalogic. Potential Impact : Significant – Oracle gets a differentiated position to balance and consolidate workloads and given its significant marketshare, gets to become a big force in the data center.
Exalogic- Optimizing (Redefining?) Java Workloads
The launch of Exalogic is a real milestone for Oracle and for the enterprise users. An integrated Java middleware aimed at balancing and consolidating workloads and potentially drive costs down for the enterprise. We now see Oracle making full use of the BEA acquisition here – the complete WebLogic stack is made to run on an optimized Linxu Kernel delivers can deliver very high reliability and a mindblowing performance. Add the Tuxedo piece here (forthcoming according to Oracle) – this makes the combo more powerful and can potentially run as a credible candidate in some cases for mainframe replacements. Tuxedo already has offerings that can enable enterprises migrate OLTP apps to run on Oracle platforms without any code change. Today Tuxedo can run on Exalogic but a fully optimized Tuxedo on Exalogic is rolling out shortly.
I could not attend the Java one conference but would expect Oracle to make Java programming easier to compete with easy to use newer cousins like VMWare’s spring source framework. Such a move would add more possibilities for growth herein.
Consolidating Customer Spend
Together with Exadata and Exalogic, Oracle’s positioning would be that they are giving their customers the real opportunity to reduce TCO. With more than 2/3rd of the IT budget goes towards sustenance leaving less than a third for new programs and innovation, Exalogic is engineered to enable customers to provision, monitor and manage the infrastructure stake end-to-end. This obliviates the need for enterprises to invest in separate storage and management mechanism for enterprises. If Oracle muscles into enterprise and help them lower costs by having an integrated, simpler to use and easy to maintain well engineered systems, By optimizing across the stack including middleware and database, Oracle can optimize so much that queries can run faster and performance can get a real push. Exalogic obviates the need to purchase SAN storage, by integrating disk storage, compute and middleware into Exalogic. Not only would it impact high end sales but Oracle also integrated several backup features including replication, snapshots, and disk to disk to tape backup, Enterprises will begin to see opportunities around consolidation od their assets and leverage their internal talent to reduce maintenance overheads – resulting in a potentially big savings, if thought through and executed well. For enterprises, such a strategy could unlock more dollars from sustanence activities to be redeployed to new programs and innovation. Belief in such a philosophy could force enterprise customers to consolidate more and more around the oracle stack.
Its undeniable that the “feel on the street” at Oracle OpenWorld this year was that it was “full speed ahead” at Oracle. Its clear that Oracle has attempted to create an entirely new architecture here and amongst the key differences include building business intelligence and analytics directly into the applications, This move also in a way gives an upgrade path to users of add –on enterprise apps like JDE, Peoplesoft etc that Oracle over a period acquired, This increases the stickiness for Oracle customers and potentially make competition look that much more distant. Oracle has been able to demonstrate its ability to integrate wide ranging technology players and show a decent financial performance and their streak seems to continue here with hardware and software engineered together to deliver successful performance, Oracle blue stack is now well ahead of the pack in terms of owning key technologies in every layer of the stack from the chip through the application. If all these reach the customer in exactly the same way Oracle demonstrated, it will be a huge success story for Oracle and the enterprise software industry,
Oracle is moving very fast here –considering its size and reach. They are now rightfully setting the pace for its ecosystem partners to keep in step and deliver value to its customers . In fact Oracle seems to be getting closer to be the leader in the enterprise technology space –putting competition on alert and forcing them to collaborate with them as well as race fast where they want to play and lead.
Oracle : Racing Ahead
Fusion Apps Launch Announced
What’s the key difference between SaaS VS On Premise. According to Larry Ellison, with SaaS – everything is designed around the plan that everything related to software needs to be managed by business whereas in an on-premise model, technical teams have the charter to initiate, manage the applications both on premise ranging from data center management to app management. With this in mind, if we ask what is Fusion upto? The Answer : With Fusion, all interfaces shall be used by business teams. Larry first brought out two definitions of cloud computing:
1. Virtualized cloud computing infrastructure services, as offered by Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing services, and
2. Software applications that are offered as a service over the Internet, as typified by Salesforce.com.
Oracle's view of cloud computing seems to match that of Amazon.com and not Salesforce.com's.This note follows Larry Ellison's sunday night keynote address and should be read along this earlier note
As I watched the live webcast of the Keynote tonight at the Oracle Openworld 2010, Larry finally announced the launch of Fusion Apps. He recalled the major acquisitions that Oracle made starting with PeopleSoft, Siebel, J.D.Edwards etc and how this forced Oracle’s hand to come with a homogenized service enabled enterprise system. Well , tonight a beaming Larry announces the limited customer launch of Fusion apps – a culmination of 5+ years of effort and Larry called this a monumental effort resulting in the announcement of launch of 100+ fusion app modules. Some customer may begin trying the product from the the fourth quarter of this year while the general availability to public is expected to be first quarter of 2011. What are Fusion Application design principles? BI driven, Standards-based, Modern, Service Oriented. and SaaS ready. Process automation is no more the focus of today's enterprise system but business intelligence driven apps are the focus of enterprise systems - this is the progression dictated by current needs of business and achievable given the maturity of technology.
In making these launch announcements, Larry pointed out that Fusion apps are being built on the same middleware that oracle sells to customers and confirmed that Fusion apps runs on top of Fusion middleware , Oracle claims that with Fusion apps, it becomes easy for customers to take oracle apps and integrate with SAP . The promise here : No rip and replace involved. This is made entirely possible as the whole app stack is said to have been using standard SOA models. The additional announcement was that the interfaces would look lot like Facebook ,very different look from ebusiness suite. Larry said that social features , activity streams and collaboration are built-in as integral to the fusion apps modules.
One of the key announcements that I was waiting to hear about was regarding the mode of availability : The answer - Al l fusion apps are available both on-premise or over the cloud and Larry claimed that no one else has done this) . Larry contrasted this with SAP experience : SAP business by design cant run in an on premise mode while traditional SAP modules are not yet cloud/SaaS enabled. The highlight here : since Fusion Apps can support multiple delivery models, Oracle claims that intermobility across clouds is assured and easy movement across clouds remain enabled. One can start with on-premise models and move it to private clouds onto hybrid and public clouds. I was not sure from the announcement about three things:
A. If the Public cloud support that Oracle announced related to Fusion Apps is a private cloud managed by Oracle accessible in a public way or if it meant support across public service providers.
B. What about multitenancy? Is it supported in the Fusion Apps architecture?
C. Would all standard databases get supported - in this vertically integrated model would the stack be optimized just to support Oracle products
Oracle pointed to the fact that the current ERP system s use 25 years old technology and even products like Salesforce.com, Taleo are also relatively old ( say 10 years or so!)
Now, back to Fusion Apps . The first set of apps encompass 7 big modules of fusion apps – Financial Management, HCM, Sales and Marketing, Project Portfolio management, SCM, PROCUREMENT & GRC . A good spread so to say, Oracle claims that these modules have within themselves, 5000 TABLES, 20000 VIEW OBJECTS, 10000 BUSINESS PROCESSES , 2500 APP MODULES – no doubt a mammoth effort. Oracle showed a teaser demo – there’s another session later in the event that will get a full blown view of Fusion Apps. Fusion Apps demo showed good clean UI with modern look and feel with lots of embedded activity stream.
Apparently , these modules were simultaneously tested with select customers while getting developed and Oracle says extensive efforts went behind optimizing the screens, workflows and functionalities. The key thing here is that the Fusion Apps platform leverages standard middleware and oracle says no proprietary language is involved. By using Java as the development standard, Oracle seems to have pushed the platform become lot more easy to adopt and Oracle highlighted that competition ranging from SAP to Salesforce.com insists on using proprietary languages to develop on their respective platforms. Such a middleware support makes it possible to connect easily with SAP and any other enterprise system and the emphasis here is that the ease come from the fact that everything is web service enabled
All these confirm the fact that Oracle is one of the few vendors to completely rebuild its apps, BI, and middleware from scratch though their stand on multitenancy is not clear as of today. It’s a major step forward to see that all models of cloud - Public, private, hybrid, on premise are fully supported with facilitated help to move easily across these clouds.
Hopefully more details about the products would be available in the Fusion Apps exclusive sessions later this week.
What’s the adoption strategy? Oracle recommends its customers to continue on your current path and they are very clearly not asking all customers to migrate to Fusion immediately. In fact Oracle did not appear to be aggressive in nudging its customers to move into this platform at the earliest. Oracle further advises that enterprises wanting to explore Fusion need to adopt a co-existence strategy ( EXPECTING 50-100 CUSTOMERS EARLY NEXT YEAR) Larry is cautious and says not all need to move into fusion apps immediately but plan moving into Fusion Apps over time. Oracle confirms on support for current ebiz suite will continue to be supported for a long time. New modules like talent management in fusion( not available in on-premise) is an ideal way to start using Fusion Apps.
Exalogic – Cloud In A Box : Another important thing that came out today is the fact that Oracle is working really hard to integrate its software and hardware capabilities. Earlier with Exadata, Oracle integrated its database prowess with hardware prowess. Now Exalogic joins Exadata in Oracle's appliance family – here Oracle is integrating its hardware with application server. Whats the objective here? With Exalogic, Oracle claims that its customers can build Amazon-like and Amazon-scale (almost) datacenter infrastructure. Exalogic is targeted at customers that are looking to deploy Java applications (custom or packaged) in large scale.Exalogic Elastic Cloud packages server, storage, network, virtual machine, operating system and application middleware in one box, which provides an environment for building and running Java applications. Exalogic touts good support for virtualization and elasticity. Exalogic is designed to work together with Exadata Database Machine. Some of the numbers that Oracle showcased were mightily impressive : Exalogic is capable of performing at 1 million HTTP requests per second and comes at a very attractive $1.075mn. Oracel claims that this is a quarter of the cost for comparable IBM machines. Exalogic customers will be running a consistent configuration, which significantly reduces pain in testing, configuration and maintenance – another significant source of cost savings for customers, while achieving order of magnitude results..
(Image Courtesy : Oracle)
Oracle, Cloud & Enterprise
I read with interest that observers of Oracle Open World 2010 brought out while reviewing the agenda : Oracle executive vice president Thomas Kurian's keynote was originally scheduled to showcase Fusion apps, but will now be all about "Oracle and Cloud Computing" and his company's role in the cloud "throughout the application lifecycle—from development and deployment to management and self-service administration. . . . Oracle's cloud solution spans all layers of the cloud, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and applications or software as a service (SaaS), and this keynote focuses on how Oracle products enable cloud computing." Am headed later this evening,to Mascone to listen to Larry Ellison talk about the much delayed and much awaited Fusion Apps launch besides others like Exadata, Java, MySql and ofcourse about Mark Hurd.
There are compelling reasons for both large and medium-sized enterprises to be interested in cloud computing. For medium-sized companies, the top reason they are looking at cloud computing is that it's so much faster and cheaper to get started. Medium-sized companies may not have sophisticated IT departments nor the money to invest in upfront capital expenses, so using a public cloud provider may be very attractive. For larger companies, using an external cloud vendor may enable small teams or departments to get a new application or a development/test environment running in minutes instead of months. The self-service aspect of public clouds means that small teams can avoid a long wait for IT departments to approve project requests, procure servers, find room for them in the data center, install software, configure software, etc. Also, some applications have a limited lifespan of a few weeks or months, perhaps for a marketing campaign, event or special project. Pay-for-use and being able to return IT resources to the pool is perfect for these situations. Some enterprises, especially larger ones with economies of scale, are implementing "private clouds" for their own exclusive use. Large enterprises are interested in building their own private cloud to get the agility, efficiency and quality of service advantages of cloud computing, while mitigating concerns about public clouds, such as security, compliance, performance, reliability, vendor lock-in and long-term costs.
While we assess cloud adoption inside enterprises, we can overlook the fact that there really is a perfect storm in IT. Cloud computing, open source and Enterprise 2.0 are complementary technology shifts that threaten incumbant vendors, offer innovation & cost benefit opportunities (&risk) while challenging IT. It may be more profound than the introduction of PCs or Web 1.0 in business.
While I mull over all these topics, I was just seeing the state of adoption of Cloud/SaaS and the mindset amo0ngst enterprise buyers in moving to the new model. While I have written about how the cloud will disrupt all the stakeholders here, here and here, I wanted to look at the inhibiting factors for cloud adoption inside enterprises and what can be done about it.
Survey after survey lists key adoption concerns of users revolving around, legacy environments –stakeholder interests –in terms of ownership, governance ,legacy environments –protecting investments, Status quo maintenance in respect of leagacy apps – why tinker with it if its performing at acceptable levels. In many places, IT and Business are thoroughly underprepared to do the generation climb – they may have to revisit all the important decisions that they have lived woth in respect of system of records, security practices, integration mechanisms, business rules and process orchestrations, master data management etc. Revisiting all these things would call for mammoth preparation from IT and Business . Arguably, this is a very overwhelming proposition for IT inside enterprises. Business would tend to believe this move into clouds/SaaS may simplify their operations but in reality expectations may be overrunning reality and with the result the list of needs keep expanding adding to the burden on cloud/SaaS adoption.
Business need to look at their portfolio and arrive at a right solution that fits their need, Oracle with its very rich and highly capable consulting and system integration partners can help customers work through this terrain towards adopting Cloud/SaaS model starting from planning, contracting, migration approaches, implementation, integration and ongoing support. But,what Ellison announces today would be very important as it will in many ways shape enterprise adoption of cloud.Oracle is a profoundly influential force in the market today, and the strategies it pursues and the positions that it takes and its view on the ecosystem influences everybody across all those constituent sets of customers and prospects and partners and stakeholders and, perhaps most of all, competitors. Through various public announcements, Oracle has indicated that Fusion Applications' technical underpinnings, which include Oracle Fusion Middleware and the JDeveloper toolkit, may result in change for many users of Oracle's existing ERP (enterprise resource planning) products, which include JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite. In terms of commercials, Oracle has indicated that Fusion Applications will obviously be sold in on-premises form as well as via hosting services like Oracle's own On Demand division, But it may be up to partners to deliver the software as true multi-tenant SaaS, which provides cost savings and cuts management chores, since multiple customers share the same application instance. Oracle has indicated in the past that upgrades could be “'like-for-like” meaning, if customers are upgrading from [E-Business Suite] financials to Fusion financials that should be a no-cost upgrade. But if it's a new module, that will be additional cost.
So far Oracle has revealed its cloud computing approach in three parts:
1. If you want an internal, or private, cloud, Oracle will sell you the hardware and/or middleware to build it.
2. If you want to use Oracle’s software on a third-party cloud, Oracle supports Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud today, and will support other clouds in the future.
3. If you want to rent rather than own Oracle’s business applications, Oracle will provide those apps under a hosted subscription model.
This calls for too much of IT assembly and what’s needed is multitenant solutions across the oracle platform with a clearly articulated strategy . Rolling out more SaaS products is a good start point that will help simplify Oracle's offerings for customers. But Oracle also needs to define packages of its hardware and software components - similar to IBM’s notion of a “cloud in a box” and/or Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). I am also keen to find out how much across the stack Oracle intends to support external products say DB2 or other virtualization platforms. All eyes are on what Larry will announce about Oracle’s cloud strategy tonight and the various cloud sessions planned in the next three days.
From information made available so far, What I see is that Oracle's strategy on public clouds remain very hazy( may be it is emerging or kept as a top secret pending an announcement in the session tonight), while their partners are Iaas/Paas partners are seen more of an additional channel. While private and hybrid cloud look to be a good starting point for enterprises to adopt, I see that the destination may be to have federated clouds and fully embracing public clouds. Also transitions to private clouds, may not be so easy as one tends to believe before venturing into the journey. Oracle's cloud approach needs to provide answers to these scenarios. I will be there talking to Oracle to find out more answers.