Oracle, AmberPoint, and the SOA Management ecosystem

Earlier this morning, Oracle announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire AmberPoint.  AmberPoint will be integrated and managed under Oracle’s Enterprise Manager division, and over time will be ported to the EM management framework.

For both existing customers and new prospects, this is positive news on many levels (i.e. broader/deeper capabilities after integration with EM, removing any doubts or concerns over vendor financial stability, product viability, solution’s strategic fit in the enterprise, etc).  AmberPoint will fill the gaps in Oracle’s SOA management capabilities today, and should play a key role for Oracle Cloud management in the future. With Oracle’s sales and distribution channels, AmberPoint will be able to reach new markets and extend market share.

In SOA management business, AmberPoint and SOA Software were the only key niche players left.  This acquisition puts Oracle in direct competition with SOA Software.  It will end the Oracle and SOA software partnership.  Looking forward, SOA Software is likely either going to get acquired – or - has to figure out a different product and partner strategy to compete. 

In terms of acquisition, the usual suspects for SOA Software include IBM, Microsoft, CA, HP, BMC or possibly even SAP.   Any of these vendors should be able to take their solutions and integrate them as part of a broader ESM/BSM solution.  SOA Software assets could help accelerate with that.  As far as product strategy, I think SOA Software will have to break away from just “SOA management” targeting enterprise customers into broader Cloud management also targeting Cloud service providers: self-service, asset/portfolio management, Cloud operational governance (quota, policies, SLA, billing, …) configuration, provisioning, automation…  They can do some of that on their own or go to market with new partners.

In summary, Oracle’s acquisition is definitely good for customers.  It also forces the other player to consider solutions and strategies.

SOA Governance, Registry, Repository ... 3 years later

A lot has happened since my post on SOA Registry & Repository 3 years ago.

In 2006, there were major acqusitions such as Mercury/Systinet and later Mercury itself by HP. BEA bought Flashline and that became AquaLogic Repositroy. Now, BEA is part of Oracle.

webMethods bought Infravio and in 2007, webMethods itself was acquired by Software AG.

Progress bought Actional. SOA Software bought Blue Titan.

IBM acquired Datapower, but decided to build its own Registry & Repository and bundled Rational Asset Manager for metadata management. Now, they are delivering a new product for Web Services security policy management.

Finally, AmberPoint's go-to-market strategey seems centered on the partner channel/OEM.

Vendors continue to enahnce products with new features and integration with other products (i.e. CCMDB for automated operations & management)...

In most cases, they fall short of delivering a solution. Even after a year, customers have difficulty to opertionalize the solution!

Fundamentally, most of the conversations with customers are product centric. Implementations are tool-driven with little or no understanding of the big picture at the client's side and requirements. There is little or no guidance/enablement around governance process design, transition/roadmap, and integration with customers' software development methodology, operational model, and existing tools...

Vendors should be very proactive on this issue to maintain that "trusted relationship" with customers.

A lot of value can be delivered and demonstrated through these solutions especially by capturing SOA governance metrics (i.e. ratio of service reuse) and operational metrics such as SLA... As customers try to figure out how to cut costs (i.e. consolidation), they can rely on these tools to provide some of the key metrics to help make the right decisions.