Back to the Middle age ?

Long time I did not write something on this blog. It is a real pleasure to write again in this blog
As you certainly did last Wednesday, I watched the web-cast about SUN/Oracle strategy. It was a very tired by the marketing show, and fortunately, I was able to stay two hours until Thomas Kurian executive vice president of Oracle products development detailed the future of Glassfish portfolio.
The speech was not very clear and a little bit confusing. As expected, I learned from Thomas Kurian that Fusion, Weblogic and JDeveloper remain strategic products for Oracle.

Glassfish App Server and Netbeans in second league ?

On the other side, it has been plan that NetBeans, Glassfish server and ESB will now play in second league. Netbeans continues as “Lightweight”IDE” and Glassfish will be the “JEE reference server”.

This does not sound well for me. I don’t know if you remember what the “Reference implementation” was before Glassfish. It was a very slow application server just useful for IT students and training. We all know that Glassfish has the potential to support enterprise application, but it will lose its credibility and be limited to departmental applications. Even if it is not true, what will be Oracle response when a company will ask a quote to support 20 Glassfish app servers for an enterprise system?

No more investment for Open/Glassfish ESB ?

http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@ocom/documents/webcontent/044523.pdf

In Kevin's presentation, it was written that Oracle will maintain and invest in JCAPS and maintain Open ESB. Regarding Kurian’s professionalism, it is obvious that every word has been chosen and if the word “invests” has been written for one product and not for another one it is not by chance.
Unfortunately, despite comforting speeches, I’m not sure that Oracle will push and help Glassfish Portfolio to progress as it did during the last two years. As some bloggers said, I think that Glassfish future is more in its community hands that in the Oracle plans. If we are able to design and implement cheap and powerful integration systems for our customers we will give a good name to the Glassfish ESB/Server and the future of our community can be more interesting.

“Oracle 2010 = IBM 1960/70” Back to the middle age?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. (George Santayana 1905)

Furthermore, I am very worried by the worst message broadcast during the web cast and it was not at all the future of Glassfish. This is Oracle's new creed: “Oracle 2010 = IBM 1960/70”. At that time, I was a young boy, but I often discussed with older colleagues that described that time as difficult for new technologies and new development. At that time, everything was decided by IBM. Your company had to choose between IBM materials, IBM OS, IBM Applications. It was a time where Big Blue was strong enough to impose its point of view to any CTO in the world. I can understand that Ellison wants to recreate the same context for his company but I did not understand why no analyst spotted that fact. (Update, that is not true anymore: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=59317 from Douglas Allen). As IBM was in the 60's 70's Oracle wants to be the new black hole of the IT. It is the return to the middle age.

Alas, this creed is the antithesis of what SUN did. Sun created Hardware, OS and software to run and collaborate with the IT diversity. From my point of view, this is the main difficulty we will face during the next years. As George de la Torre said (http://n2.nabble.com/OpenESB-GlassfishESB-strategy-td4472113.html#a4472113) “We convinced many large organizations to use open standard approach that SUN SOA strategy promoted. Dealing with Oracle we take the risk to go back to the past and be locked in by its business model far from an open system”.

This is the key lesson we have to learn from Wednesday web cast