SOA Testing: BEA vs. Oracle

Oracle purchase of BEA for $8.5B is a strong indicator that the tech market is in a consolidation mood. I have SOA Tested both BEA WebLogics and Oracle OC4J. For details on SOA Testing both servers, see the following articles:

1) Getting Started with Message-Level Encryption on WebLogic Server 9.2

2) Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo

Having SOA Tested Both Oracle OC4J and BEA webLogics extensively, here are some items that stood out:

1) Installing Oracle OC4J was easier than WebLogics.
2) The foot print of OC4J is smaller.
3) Configuring Oracle OC4J was much easier that BEA WebLogics
4) Setting security policies within OC4J was much easier than in WebLogics
5) BPEL Process Manager components were easily configurable in OC4J.
6) The documentation and examples for setting SOA Policies were more mature in OC4J.
7) The Web Services stacks are equally mature.

I expect OC4J to do really well within the BEA install base. Oracle SOA Suite is very well packaged and will be adopted by BEA customers. I love BEA's technology, however, for rapid mass adoption, Oracle has done a better job. With this acquisition, Oracle will have a better perception in the AppServer market and will be able to capitalize on this over time. But then again, there is the great Opensource market - Tomcat.

Through my SOA Testing endeavours, I found SOAPSonar from Crosscheck Networks to do a great job in exercising the web services stacks of both app servers. Other testing vendors fell short of providing the extensive testing capabilities required withing a SOA environment. For more information about SOAPSonar, visit:

Crosscheck Networks

SOA + Utility Computing

As Amazon EC2 exploded onto the IT scene summer 2006 with a beta "by invitation only," we were fortunate to get an account and by August 2006 start pounding on the first practical Utility Computing infrastructure that was more than a bunch of slides and marketing mumbo-jumbo.

Every astute marketing team has at some point used Utility, Grid and Virtualization in their power point slides and brochure-ware. I have been at many conferences and on many calls where I kept hearing such terms but couldn't figure out what all this hoopla was all about, I don't think the presenters knew either ;-) If I can't touch it, I don't understand it. If I can't play with it, it is just vaporware. So, I kept my eye on Grid computing but never really saw a commercial (non-academic) benefit of using grids and utility computing. As much as I am into Astronomy, I couldn't see myself ever using an academic grid to compute the Milky Ways expansion rate or some other esoteric problem.

Finally, Amazon EC2 exploded on the scene with a startling characteristic: a full web services-based provisioning interface. Starting up and terminating Linux instance is as simple as a SOAP call.

This characteristic is the most significant and disruptive aspect of the Amazon EC2 platform. All Hardware and Software product vendors take notice: Your products should be Amazon-aware for true scalability.

So we did what any geek would do, played with the EC2 platform day and night and then published a first paper on EC2: "Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo" on Dr. Dobbs.

A few weeks later, SAP has taken notice. Perhaps it had something to do with the emails that we sent to 40 SAP folks about this concept. A couple of significant announcements/interviews from SAP this week:

InfoWorld: Q&A: SAP chief developer heads 'clouds'
Business Week: Opening Up to Collaboration (interview with Shai Agassi, President SAP Product Development)

We sincerely hope that large vendors such as SAP, Oracle, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft take advantage of platforms like EC2 for both their SaaS offerings as well as making their software components EC2-aware. We believe SOA Testing Tools will have a significant role to play in making SOA components run smoothly on Utility Computing Platform such as EC2.

SOA Consolidation

Reactivity was purchased by Cisco for a cool $135MM, making it the largest acquisition in the SOA space. DataPower (aquired by IBM for ~$105MM and Systinet (acquired by Mercury for ~$102MM) were the other >$100MM acquisitions. Other smaller ones include Sarvega (acquired by Intel for ~$40MM), Conformative (acquired by Intel for ~$32MM), Infravio (acquired by webMethods for ~$38MM) pretty much consolidated the space leaving Forum Systems, Layer7, SOA Software and Amberpoint as the independent private companies. Further consolidation is inevitable.

The second wave of SOA Infrastructure startups in underway. Andrew Nash, CTO of Reactivity, started a company focused on XML identity. Sonoa Systems is the Next Gen XML Infrastructure Company still in stealth mode and is funded by SAP Ventures, Norwest Ventures, and Bay Partners.

Ofcourse, all XML/SOA infrastructure companies will require extensive SOA Testing to make their products enterprise ready. They will have to deal with the extensive web services/XML standards such as WS-Security, its profiles such as User Name, X.509, Kerberos, SAML tokens as well as SOAP signatures and encryption. Starting XML/SOA infrastructure companies from scratch will enable such new startups to build ground up on relatively newer and useful standards such as WS-Policy, WS-SecureConversation, etc. The second cycle will be shorter with exits taking 3-4 years unlike the 5+ years needed by the 1st wave of SOA consolidations.

For an interesting interview on Sonoa by Eric Knorr, see this video clip.

Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo

With Mashup Camp (Boston) right around the corner, I was happy to see Dr. Dobbs Journal publish an article that I have collaborated on with David Shaffer, Sr. Director Product Mgmt, Oracle Integration and Rizwan Mallal, from Crosscheck Networks, R&D. The article is written to drive home an important set of shifts that are a result of Amazon's Utility Compute Platforms, EC2, S3, SDS, etc. and it's intersection with web services products such as Oracle SOA Suite 10g.

In this article, we focused on how the Oracle SOA Suite can be used beyond its conventional business process role and more as a core SOA infrastructure traffic management platform for content-based routing, load balancing and fail over type functions for Amazon EC2 Linux instances.

http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/196900803

Prediction: In the next 2-3 years, perhaps sooner, Amazon EC2 in combination with SOA Suites will cause a fundamental shift in corporate computing. Also, EC2 & SOA will unleash unprecedented low cost innovation where startups will get off the ground with far lower capital than that required in the pre-Amazon and pre-web services era.