Sun, Oracle and all others

I thought of writing about it the minute I heard. This is certainly not a common PR.
Yet, I held myself, counted to ten. Now I'm ready to elaborate my opinion.
First of all, Oracle and mainly Larry are magicians. They keep doing one of the most important keys to success in business - which is taking your future in your hands. Be active and not passive. Larry keeps acting on every field he believes there's value for its shareholders. Meanwhile he certainly does right.

Now, many predict on the different line of products of Sun and its future.
So, generally speaking Sun has few important intellectual property - Hardware, Unix operating system, Java community ownership, SOA platforms (mostly open sourced) and couple more packages (like Identity management and others).

So, the most interesting stuff for Oracle would be the green fields - Hardware, Unix and Java community ownership. Not that others are not important, but they overlap.

For Oracle, they made it to the one-stop-shop league, just like the big ones HP, IBM.
Yet, Oracle is different - they have infrastructure, but also packages.
This might lead HP/IBM to think differently about packages... So maybe SAP is under the hood?
Whats with the SOA platforms and Java world? I think it is a mystery and we'll have to wait for Oracle with that. Too much power is in their hands now in the Java zone. It might break the long partnership of all non-MS big vendors.
SOA? I believe Sun was not a major player in the SOA world, and therefore Oracle will benefit from some of the technology intellectual property and integrate it into its portfolio, but nothing more than that. Here, certainly the BEA acquisition was much more important for Oracle.
And yet, having said all that, Oracle buys so many companies, many of these acquisitions fail and loose their value.
Whats with the competition? I'm probably not the only one who thinks so, but IBM and SAP could have been better without this deal... Still, time will tell if it threats IBM, HP and SAP more than Oracle and Sun did so as separated companies.

WebSphere Application Server 10th birthday

Just like any birthday, celebration includes party which allows you to be a WebSphere rockstar for a second, and a memory book, review of the past.
Go ahead, take couple of minutes and review the memory book. It brings an interesting piece of history.
Unfortunately, I personally can't state I was there right from the start, but I joined quite early when there was still WebSphere Application Server v3.0, when we had free love everywhere ;-).

BPM 2.0

I read recently about the IBM BPM as a service initiative named BPM Zero, part of Project Zero.
There's not too much of information on this project, yet the initiative sounds innovative and it might bring BPM to the cloud.
See this post by Christina Lau (IBM).
I'll wait till more information is being published.

Revese BPM

I think this is something I can copyright. At least the term...

I must start with some words on the economic situation - although not directly related. The last couple of weeks / months are nightmare for managers - either they are customers, suppliers or anywhere else in the food chain.
The financial storm made most (not all???) companies take out their "optimization programs" and act. As our financial forecast is totally unclear, it is up to each companies economic atmosphere, entry point to the situation and risk assessment to decide how far should their plan updates go.
The name of the game is basically credit lines and cash flow. It affects many other territories in the company but it all starts there - basically this is the major challenge for each company these days.

But, that's not what I had in mind to write about.
So what's Reverse BPM? practically, what I mean by reverse is a different approach to BPM. As most businesses think business process today, yet it might not be reflected in their IT environment, it means that the best value they can get is from putting closer the business processes and the IT. Yet, investing in IT is excellent (well, I'm a stakeholder here) but expensive and has a lead time. So, what do I offer? minor to no change in IT with marginal impact on business visibility into its business processes.
This can be achieved by integrating Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) into existing applications and platforms. This will provide business process insights and KPIs that will allow the business user to optimize the process in time and hence cut costs and generate more revenue.
This reverse approach is not widely adopted, can you figure out why?

BPM Lifecycle - It is real!

For the past couple of years BPM lifecycle is marked as a promising solution for business agility supported by intelligent technology.
I feel that within the last year, this promise becomes reality.
I still hardly see organizations nor integrators that fully uncover the promise of full BPM lifecycle.
I do see islands of BPM - IT, O&M (organization & methods), BI. All are very relevant, but not integrated - no single language, no single focal point, no central meta model.
In my next posts, I'll review the new capabilities and technologies that allow correlating all these islands into one land (or is it sea?).

Time to apologize ("Yom Kipur")

I have nothing to apologize for ;-) - so if anyone feels he deserves and apology from me - here it is - I apologize. That's the spirit and tradition of the Jewish "Yom Kipur", ending today.
I do feel that in the very near future many of my colleagues will have to apologize. Not that they can do anything about it... Seems like the economic storm has knocking on the High-Tech door.
Few of the recent posts over the web -
According to Om Malik, Sequoia Capital recently told its portfolio companies to hunker down for a long economic downturn. Sequoia is one of the largest and most prestige venture capitals and ofcourse they vision is one we should respect.
This and more, SAP issued a third-quarter warning. eBay announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees. Microsoft & SAP admitted they've stopped all recruitment all over the world. These are only three out of many recent announcements of high-tech and IT companies adjusting themselves to the new economic situation.
This ofcourse doesn't mean lay offs all over the place, but we're all looking around. If your suppliers, customers and competitors lays off - watch out for your business - you're next.
And yet, within this storm, one positive mark - IBM announced its third-quarter earnings per share rose 22% year over year. IBM claims this growth is based at the emerging markets. Out of many sad announcements recently - this is certainly a positive way to finish this post ;-).

Shana Tova! ("Happy new year" - Hebrew)

Yet another year ends and just right next to it stands the new one - waiting to enter.
We end this year with a financial storm which I'm among the believers that we haven't seen its end yet. I predict next year (coming in 5 days) will still have shaky grounds.
Yet, for the IT services market and the SOA market specifically, we find this market storm as an opportunity - regulations and need for innovation will require the financial markets to enhance their IT infrastructure in order to support global business amendments.
The Israeli market is not yet there (will it be?!) but US financial market changed dramatically in the last couple of days - 2 of its largest investment banks (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) turned into regulated banks. This means a complete business renovation.
From our perspective, this means a strong need for IT, and strong correlation to SOA.
So, lets have a toast for that and for the coming new year!
Shana Tova!