OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

Back at Oracle Open World 2008, Oracle gave some lip service to how they would get into cloud computing... in case you are not familiar with the term, "cloud computing" is a way of designing your systems so that your data resources (and sometimes your services) behave as if they are "in the internet cloud." Its a combination of a service-oriented architecture, software-as-a-service, and storage-as-a-service. Developers love it, but system administrators are still a bit weary...

Basically, you rent the computational power and storage you need, and only pay for what you use. In theory you can rely on your provider -- such as Google or Amazon.com -- to take care of backups for you. Its a great idea for startups (Twitter does it) and mid-sized companies, so they can keep costs down, while still leaving room to grow. For large companies with their own dedicated data centers, cloud computing makes less sense for production software... but its usually a great idea for development and testing.

Anyway... I was curious how Oracle's "Cloud" strategy would develop... and I was pleasantly surprised to find some recent collaboration between Amazon and Oracle. They put together some Best Practices for Oracle In The Cloud, which I found on Justin Kestylyn's blog:

I really like the idea of encrypting database backups, and storing them in the cloud. That's an excellent idea, for pretty much anybody... and it is supported back to Oracle Database 9i. Check out the Cloud Backup Whitepaper for more info...

I also really see the value for using the Amazon cloud for the persistence layer for archives. The Oracle Universal Online Archive could be a real killer app, but proving its value will need about a Terabyte of storage, just to do a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, that's not exactly something you can run on a VM Ware virtual machine... but you could do it as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more and more archiving solutions that use Amazon's Cloud for persistence...

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I had expected that it would take another 3 weeks to release this, but my second book is now available for purchase! As promised, this is more of a business strategy book, and less of a technical book... however, Andy and I did sneak in some good implementation details along the way. We designed this book so every member of your ECM team should get something useful out of it.

The purpose of the book is to present what we call a "pragmatic strategy for content management." For multiple reasons -- both political and technical -- it is rarely feasible for all of your content management products to be from one vendor. Perhaps you just merged with another company and you each have different vendors; perhaps you need blogs and wikis now and cannot wait for your ECM vendor to create a decent offering; perhaps SharePoint has grown like a fungus in your enterprise, and now you need some way to manage the insanity.

Some say the solution is rationalization: consolidate all content into one system... but that's not the whole story. You don't want to wind up like those poor saps running Lotus Notes, do you? Your users will rebel if you take away their nice collaboration tools, or if you tell them they can't have new ones. Entire departments will collapse if you eliminate content silos without any concern for users' productivity.

Instead, the pragmatic approach is to do the following:

• Consolidate content when possible into a "strategic ecm infrastructure." This can -- if desired -- be the single repository that satisfies all your content management needs; however this is not a requirement.
• Federate content services to tactical and legacy applications. This means managing content in other repositories with a combination of enterprise search, universal records management, and enterprise mashups.
• Secure content wherever it lives. Ironically, in most cases your data is only secure when it is not in use! Once you move it from one system to another, it is at risk. Your information should always be secure, whether it is locked down in a database, or in a USB thumb drive at the bottom of your sock drawer.

The book is 250 pages long... but you don't have to read the whole thing. The chapter breakdown is as follows:

1. The State of Information Management: a good grounding in what exactly ECM is all about, and why it is important.
2. A Pragmatic ECM Architecture: the steps you need to take in order to realize the value of an ECM initiative.
3. Assessing Your Environment: make a big list of what needs to be done, and by whom. Which content should be consolidated, and which is best left where it is?
4. Strategic ECM Infrastructure and Middleware: this is the "strategic" part of the puzzle. Consolidate to this system whenever cost-effective, and extend it to your portals and enterprise applications with SOAs, ESBs, or ECM standards (WebDAV, CMIS, etc.).
5. Managing Legacy and Non-Strategic Content Stores: all the tools for "tactical" integrations with systems that are not (yet) cost effective to consolidate. Your content management strategy should never punish you for failing to consolidate: the goal is to make content manageable.
6. Secure Information Wherever It Lives: tools for making sure content is secure, even when it leaves a secure repository.
7. Bringing Structured and Unstructured Strategies Together: your ECM initiative should be a part of a broader information management initiative. This chapter presents tools that helps you bridge this gap.
8. ECM and Enterprise 2.0: here we present a (better) definition of Enterprise 2.0, and how ECM fits into the ecosystem. It presents a strategy for Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, and explains how many Enterprise 2.0 initiatives could fail without a comprehensive strategy.

Chapters 1, 2, and 8 are relevant no matter which vendor you use for Enterprise Content Management. We do mention Oracle numerous times, but you can just BLEEEEEEP over that if you use tools from different vendors.

Chapters 3 through 7 show how to implement a "pragmatic ECM strategy" using Oracle tools. Some of this data may or may not be relevant to non-Oracle customers. In most cases, you should find it helpful to see what is possible, so you can determine the distance between where you are now, and where you want to be tomorrow.

I worked pretty hard on this, and I'm relatively pleased with the results... but I'm sure the haters out there will find something to complain about ;-)

Enjoy!

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Well... this is pretty negative...

CMS Watch came out with their 12 predictions for 2009, and number seven was "Oracle will fall behind in the battle for knowledge workers." Here's the relevant quote:

At one level, Oracle had a banner year in 2008: completing or consolidating numerous large acquisitions that bring in heavy streams of ever-beloved maintenance revenues. But 2009 will expose Oracle's weakness with front-office applications at a time when Microsoft, IBM, and many smaller players are fighting for the hearts and minds of knowledge workers.

Customers are already feeling indigestion, as different Oracle teams market overlapping and often incomplete solutions. For example, Oracle is struggling to combine four different enterprise portal offerings, and many customers are chafing at the financial and architectural challenges of aligning with the putative winner, Oracle WebCenter Suite (OWS). Similarly, collaboration and social software services remain divided between OWS and the new Beehive offering -- a bad situation made worse by the fact that both are really development platforms and not finished toolsets. Meanwhile, longtime Stellent UCM customers complain that Oracle is moving away from the product's Web CMS roots to emphasize heavy-duty document and records management.

Some thoughts...

First, the acquisition of BEA did really shake up Oracle's whole knowledge management / collaboration / Enterprise 2.0 strategy... and yes, there is considerable overlap in the product offerings. However, ultimately this will be a good thing, because only the best of the best will become strategic products under the "WebCenter" brand. This will take time to digest... it may or may not be "all better" by the 11g release in 2009, but I remain optimistic based on the previews I've seen... so the architecture will likely become much more simplified.

Although, I do have to agree that a lot of Oracle's offerings here are platforms, instead of complete applications -- Stellent/ECM being one exception. The WebCenter platform will never be huge, unless it has pre-packaged "Killer Apps" built on it. This is a general fact about all platforms, and is very much true here as well. There are several in the works -- collectively called "Fusion Applications" -- but I have no clue when they will be released.

Second, regarding the financial challenges, I guess I don't know what he means here... the current WebCenter bundle is a bit pricey, mainly because it's a bundle of so many different tools. Remember, WebCenter is a brand, and not just a single piece of technology. Oracle will probably figure out smaller, cheaper bundles that sell better, so I don't see this as that much of a long term problem. Maybe some folks are upset about the price of migration from older platforms to WebCenter... but nobody is forcing them to upgrade. They'll have to do a technology refresh at some point, and Oracle will continue to support and make new released of their non-strategic product lines... so I guess I'll need to hear more before I can respond.

Third, regarding existing Stellent UCM customers, Oracle is actually moving in both WCM and document/records management at the same time. The heavy-duty document and records management offerings are badly needed by many of their existing enterprise customers, so there's a lot of sales opportunity by productizing a few enterprise-level integrations. While at the same time, they spent a lot of time and energy in the next version of Site Studio (Web Content Management) including their Open WCM initiative... This will be big in 2009.

The Stellent faithful have been hearing this line for a long time, but their patience will be rewarded as soon as January.

For those who watched the December 10 customer call, you'd know that you will be able to play with this next-generation of Site Studio relatively soon. A lot of it will be released as Site Studio 10gr4 at the beginning of 2009. The rest will be released in 11g, which is slated for some time in 2009. Alan Baer will be doing a Deep Dive into Oracle Site Studio 10gr4 in January, if you want to know more.

And finally, we should note that of the dozen 2008 predictions by CMS Watch, they claim seven came true, three did not, and two are in the "maybe" pile... so take this prediction with a grain of salt. Oracle has several decent ECM products due out in 2009... so this warning could be both a wake-up call, and a self-denying prophesy.

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