Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play
Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with
Charles Phillips. The invitation to came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".
The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been
pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "
never look a gift horse in the mouth"...
As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was - for Oracle - close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.
So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:
- Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today - Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.
- BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people,assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.
- Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002-05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.
- As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle - and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)
As an interesting footnote for analyst-watchers: at the end of the meeting, the Oracleists said they were "very keen to continue the dialogue". This was fantastic news, given MWD's status with Oracle! But what was behind that? Had they had some kind of road-to-damascus experience about the value of smaller analyst firms? Well, no... it turns out that Oracle's PR team is interested in talking to me as a "blogger" - but this is something separate from my work as an analyst for MWD. MWD is still in the same position as an analyst firm, and it seems I'll need to have a separate relationship with Oracle as an analyst. I'll leave an analysis of what this might mean for how Oracle perceives the relative value of "bloggers" and "analysts" (particularly in light of discussions like
this one about what defines an analyst) as an exercise to the interested reader.
It's funny, though: last time I looked, I was just one person... it seems that getting collaboration and conversation right is indeed not about introducing new technology, but about adjusting your culture and organisation.
Labels: analyst biz, enterprise 2.0, Oracle
A week of firsts
You might think having been a senior analyst for 8 years that I'd have seen most things. Well, this has definitely been a week of firsts for me.
My first ever
JavaOne conference; my first week in joining MWD as a principal analyst covering the application delivery and lifecycle management market (moving from 8 years at Ovum) and finally my first blog entry.
I accepted Sun's invitation to JavaOne this year because rumour has it that interest in the conference and support for Java is waning, and I wanted to see for myself just what was going on.
To be honest, I've never given much credence to such hyperbolic scaremongering, and what I've seen over the last couple of days merely backed that up. There's no doubt that Java's progress has been and continues to be marked with difficulties: controlling interests and agendas, delays, confusion, swerving focus and industry bickering. However, this is to be expected of a technology that has been successful and widely adopted.
Java is a mature technology that has many masters, spawned a number of lucrative revenue streams, opens many doors and is consumed in many different ways. The competitive alternative ?
Microsoft's .NET environment, although just as formidable, is beset with similar issues and one or two harder challenges.
That's the good news. The bad news is that Sun's role and involvement from technology, market and management perspectives alike has been opaque at best.
Sun has never been particularly clear about how it actually makes money from Java or indeed maximising the opportunities. This doesn't really look like changing in the future.
For all that, I have enjoyed these past few days at the conference and gained a good deal of valuable insight; some disturbing, some surprising, others anticipated. Rumours of the conference's lack of importance and influence are, in my view, premature, and I will share my thoughts with you in future postings.
Far from what I was expecting, there has been a general air of optimism at the conference.
In ending this blog post I find myself with two regrets:
Firstly, the sheer number of interesting and enticing presentations made it inevitable that I should miss more than I could attend. Those that I did get to which I found particularly compelling, and would certainly recommend anyone getting the presentation materials or podcasts / webcasts of the sessions, were:
"Sun Mobility General Session ? Java wherever you are" (the information delivered was certainly interesting and a good insight into JavaFX mobile development - and it's clear that Sun is after the same market as
Microsoft and
Adobe in this space); and
"Real World, Real Time, Instant Results: Make Information work for you" presented by
Jeff Henry of IBM (very interesting, insightful and for the most part non-partisan). I was booked on, but missed,
"Service-oriented Architecture and Java Technology: Level-setting standards, Architecture and code" delivered by Steve Jones and Duane Nickull. By all accounts this had some good insight and valuable information from guys with a lot of end user and real world interactions. The other sessions I wanted to attend but they clashed were
"The many moons of Eclipse" and
"Case Studies from the JavaFX technology world".
My second regret is not having attended JavaOne during the past eight years as a senior analyst, if only to have seen it in its heyday when Java was the exciting new kid on the technology block and firms were rushing and fighting to be part of the show.
Given the size of the big hall and the number of organisations exhibiting I would definitely say that whilst veterans of the show might argue that the volumes are not up with its peak years (early 2000s) the show still maintains enough of an influence to entice the great and the good in this market and plenty of start-ups and innovators.
JavaOne, in my opinion, is still an incredibly important and very necessary conference. My worry is that it becomes increasingly a mouthpiece for Sun rather than a standalone entity.
Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be writing a lot more about the state of the development market and taking a closer look at the value of some of the underlying technologies and products. I welcome any comments and questions and look forward to readers getting in touch to further the debate.
Labels: development, Java, JavaFX, JavaOne, mobility, Sun
