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Post-call Recap on the Oracle-Sunopsis Buy

I sat in on the conference call today to hear what they had to say. My summation: underwhelming. It was a strange call. A fair number of people dropped off early. I was going to, but I wanted to see if anyone asked interesting questions. One or two, but that was it.

I was left with the impression that Oracle still hasn't got its act together and doesn't understand the integration market. They just understand that they need something that works sort of like, I don't know, SAP Netweaver?

It looks to me like maybe Fusion was stuck in a rut, and pressure was building to do something, so they went out and bought Sunopsis. The SOA/EAI side of the Sunopsis product line makes sense for Oracle. The ETL side of Sunopsis makes little sense, other than the perception that it deals better with heterogeneous sources and targets.

The marketing messages around the call were related to Oracle's applications, and how they needed something to fill in gaps. On the data integration side, they need an EII product to complement OWB. They need to fill some SOA and data synchronization gaps. They need to rename OWB and put some money into a reasonable set of native connectors.

I expected some insight into an integration strategy. Instead, we were treated to a display of the obvious. Metadata driven ETL good. Custom coding bad. It was actually hard to take, which is why several folks left the call early.

I suspect that Fusion is being managed by people whose experience in the integration space is limited to old-style EAI products. This was demonstrated when they wasted time explaining how reusable logic in the middle with connections to sources and targets was better than writing code at each end of a pipe.

The more I reflect on Oracle marketing, their inattention to the integration market, and their seeming inability to manage Fusion, the more annoyed I get with them. I think they see Netweaver and want to make something similar. The difference is that SAP has a uniform set of applications while Oracle has a mass of unrelated technologies. Fusing all those applications together is going to be more painful and expensive than they've been promising.

Posted by Mark Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:25:00 PM | permalink |