« I thought You Said you Want a Revolution... | Main | What we have here, iAndroid, is a failure to Navigate »
January 17, 2008
- SOA What’s new at the end of the day
Okay, this is going to take better minds than mine for the next year to get straight. My general rule for companies in merger acquistion mode is leave them alone for a year and then see where they stand. For Oracle, I have yet to find a timeline that works for the digestive process of companies. HotSip, TimesTen, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Telephony@work, Metasolv, etc - and now BEA. With Cisco, you always assumed IOS would eat the acquisiton and keep the developers. But with Oracle...nothing looks like a feature addition in Oracle DB. Its like the digestion of these companies is constipated. In theory, they should be the DB that does telecom best. In reality, I don’t see it.
Likewise, I am trying to get my thoughts gathered about MySQL being part of SUN. Is SUN going to better integrate JAVA into MySQL? Is Java going to compete for the P part of the acronym LAMP? Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) has beed driving a lot of the web 2.0 market for over a decade... Probably SUN digests MySQL better than Oracle does BEA, but that’s only the symptom not the trend.
The trend is that the stars are aligning for better integration of Web 2.0 services. Its time for the Service Oriented Architecture to be put to the test and for me personally, I am skeptical.
Here is why.
At 60,000 feet the web 2.0 guys are exciting as hell to watch and they can attract lots of people to play with their stuff. But nothing in the acquistion of trial users is as valuable as a usage statistic that shows real activity day after day. A discussion I was part of yesterday pointed out that 30% of the a specifically email strong companies customer’s had moved to Facebook because SPAM made email no longer valuable. In someways, I will make the case that many of the APPS on facebook are little more than mashup spam.
So what makes Web 2.0 valuable is the ability to control (and I mean regress) the trials to something more mobile. Network operators are looking for the API holy grail and Oracle and SUN are looking to be at the heart of giving it to them. This is where the story is in Telecom and the Internet today and VoIP is another set of initials that belong in the LAMP / SOA mix of tools.
Posted by carl at January 17, 2008 05:52 AM