Oracle announces product strategy

Recently Oracle completed the acquisition of Sun and is now finally able to publish their product strategy. You can listen to the webcasts here but I tought that I could summarise the 5 hours into 5 minutes.

As a software architect, I do not like to take about products so much but it is still important to watch what is going on in the market.

Oracle has strengthened it's existing product portfolio in the following areas:

1. Hardware. The Sun server solutions completes Oracles strategy as far as a complete stack is concerned. They can now begin moving computationaly intensive processes (such as cryptography) down into the silicon and increase the performance and efficiency. This also moves them from being a software company competing with Microsoft to being a complete vendor capable of going after IBM. Their 'Industry in a Box' strategy will also move them to larger customers.
2. Java. To Oracle, Java is a central component. Every time they acquire a non-Java product (for example the BAM component in SOA Suite) they have rewrite it to Java. Oracle has committed to spend more resources than Sun on JCP and OpenSource in the hope of revitalising the Java community,
3. Cloud Computing. Oracle is about to make the big push into Cloud Computing. With the 11g product line, hardware and management tools and the Sun office platform we can expect some Cloud related product releases during the coming year.

Oracle has committed to keeping MySQL alive and has created an autonomous business unit for it. Traditionally a licensing company, if their Cloud Computing initiative is going to work, they will need to learn how to make the Open Source/support model profitable.

Sun was very close to announcing their OpenOffice for the Cloud product. Oracle is going to continue this development and integrate it with their own office support products.

Oracle definitly has a Cloud Computing strategy - both private/internal and public/external. They already have offerings in the basic hardware, application server and SOA areas and have signaled that future releases of all of their other applications (PeopleSoft, Siebel etc) will run on Fusion Middleware 11g.

During the webcasts, 'strategic products' and 'supported products' were named a lot. I got a chance to ask someone from Oracle what this meant. On a 'strategy product' there will typically be over 400 developers. On a 'supported product' there will be less than 20.

JCAPS, InterConnect and Glassfish have been called supported products. Fusion Middleware, SOA Suite and Service Bus have all been identified as strategic products. Being an architect with a 3 - 5 year perspective, it is clear which Oracle products to choose from.

Oracle is not done with their acquisitions but their stack is now relatively complete. So, I expect that they will be moving on with the 'integrated' part of their corporate slogan: 'Complete. Integrated. Hot-Pluggabøle. Best-of-Breed'.