Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Middling marks for Oracle Middleware show

The Latvian delegation here is attending events of interest at Oracle OpenWorld, but no one is jumping up and down at what they have experienced (mostly at specialist sessions that I did not attend). Oracle came out with a new offer of Lifetime Support for its applications, letting users phase out apps that work for them at their own pace, but Lattelekom people here said they had already upgraded to the 10g version of the database, so it was nothing significant for them. The head of a Latvian software reseller and solutions implementer also didn't think the session he attended was, to rephrase his attitude in collequial English -- "all that hot shit".
Some of the worlds best IT experts, when given a chance to speak to Latvian IT people, find they are preaching to the converted or to those who have already been there, done that. Maybe this is a good sign. Anyway, it is what I learned over some weird dinner of Thai/Chinese food and beer here in San Francisco. Can't knock the food, that's for sure.
The major theme here is Oracle Fusion Middleware, the stuff that, er, makes other stuff talk to and work together with, you know, stuff. Best I can do at this hour. Woke around 3 AM, started working frantically, deadline for my day job paper, or was it? WTF day is it in Latvia tommorrow in terms of what tommorrow is from Latvia's time zone??
Back " in ze old country" looks like Bite is getting its way with interconnect, unless it is making a publicity stunt by saying it signed the agreement, but not Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT). It takes two to make a contract and until LMT signs (and agrees to rates it was very unhappy with, or renegotiates them, there ain't shit yet). But San Francisco is no place to follow this story :(. When I last looked, LMT was saying to Bite, go bite your (Toxic) card.
So, who will launch the even cheaper Vomit card? Feces anyone? (Fe-ts-es, as pronounced in Latvian, means nothing, sounds strange, talk to me though Fet-sess).
Ok, sorry Jesper, enough of that. So you didn't like my idea of a Draugiem card. Whatever...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today, Oracle announced it will expand its Fusion applications to run on both Oracle middleware and on IBM middleware. As you know, Oracle has several lines of applications, both organic and acquired, and Fusion is its converged future application suite. Until now, Oracle has maintained that its new applications will run only on Oracle middleware (portal, application server, identity management and database).

A major validation of IBM's middleware strategy, today's announcement clearly points to our success in the marketplace and strengthens our ability to help the widest scope of clients possible become on demand businesses by leveraging WebSphere as the foundation of a Service Oriented Architecture. Based on strong feedback from its customers, Oracle is announcing that, in addition to its Fusion middleware, it will provide:

Native support for WebSphere, including portal, application server and process server
Use of Tivoli Identity Management products for directory, single sign-on and identity management
Continued support of DB2 on the applications that already exploit it (e.g. PeopleSoft), as well as evaluation of its role in the future Fusion applications

Oracle already has several existing applications that exploit IBM middleware and has announced the intention to acquire more with its bid for Siebel. We especially welcome its newly-announced acceptance of IBM middleware in Oracle's future Fusion applications. While this is an important milestone, we also recognize it is only the beginning of a longer journey.

Although Oracle remains an IBM competitor in some areas, we are pleased to have it as an application provider on our run-time platforms across several SWG brands. At the same time, we recognize that much can and must happen between today's announcement and the expected release of Fusion in the 2007-2008 timeframe.


Robert LeBlanc
General Manager
Application & Integration Middleware
IBM Software Group

Anonymous said...

"Fēces" in Latvian does mean exactly the same thing. Well, it is not widely used, probably by veterinarians only.