Nulli Secundus was again in attendance at Oracle Open World 2010 and the conference/marketing festival was everything we expected and then some. Crowds were the name of the game with a reported 40,000 people in attendance. The numbers probably included about 10,000 Oracle sales and marketing people (they were everywhere) and about 8-10,000 JavaOne attendees with the balance being a mix of Oracle partner attendees and customers.
Exalogic was the focus of several of the keynotes by Oracle and we at Nulli are thinking that these machines might be a necessary investment required to support the new SOA and Fusion applications. Having reviewed the new additions to the Oracle 11g Identity and Security suite we think we'll need a "low-end" Exalogic machine fitted into a Samsonite travel suitcase for each of our consultants supporting the roll-out of the new stack.
With the announcement of the long awaited and soon to released Fusion applications, the ExaLogic machines or similiarly configured hardware will be another key component to include in your project budgets. These Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications will need to have a harmony of hardware and software well coordinated in the middle-ware tier to support the Fusion applications from a performance and support perspective.
Larry Ellison made several key presentations during the conference which was a change from previous years. His opening night talk on "the cloud" with a sneak preview on Exalogic set the stage for how important this Open World Conference was for Oracle.
Middle-ware by its very nature lends itself to being complex. The delivery on the SOA suites for Security and Identity 11g by Oracle now ups the ante on how these tools will need to be orchestrated and deployed in close harmony with one another. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) foundations for all of the Fusion applications and for the newly released Oracle 11g R1 Identity and Security products makes for a need for hardware that can scale and expand to support the data coordination and communication between all the reliant components. I will write more on this in a subsequent post.
Sessions that discussed the roadmap for Identity Management with respect to the Sun Microsystems product set of Sun Identity Manager (IDM, SIM, Waveset), the Sun LDAP directory and Sun OpenSSO were heavily attended. I am not certain everyone walked away with a warm and fuzzy feeling about where things were heading but it left people with an opportunity to hear the options.
Fundamentally, if you are looking at Sun OpenSSO and the Sun LDAP directory server you have a number of updates in your future with Oracle. In the longer-term, if you are looking at the question of "Do I upgrade Sun IDM to version 8?", then you have to assess the pain of upgrading from your current release level to version 8 relative to installing OIM and porting features from Sun IDM. If you are for example at version 6 of Sun IDM, you will need to upgrade 6 to 7 and then 7 to 8 as there is no direct path from 6 to 8. How portable will the connectors be under OIM? Each one under the open connector framework will have to be assessed and a gap analysis conducted to determine which connectors will be ported and which will have to be net-new.
Similarly, with OpenSSO a client will have to investigate the effort and cost of continuing to upgrade from version 7 of OpenSSO to version 8. Clients will also have to weigh the option of upgrading to version 9 or greater as delivered under the OpenSSO community. ForgeRock is now a software development company that has hung its future on the success of continuing to develop the OpenSSO code line with new features and offering full product support to customers interested in an enterprise support model for their software. So customers now need to assess staying with the Oracle OpenSSO applications for Access Management ect. vis-a-vis moving their support model over to ForgeRock's OpenAM and continuing to utilize the OpenSSO applications knowing that there is support and net new features coming from an open-source development company. The other alternative they might consider is switching to Oracle Access Manager (OAM) but this will require parallel infrastructure to be put in place during the migration development, testing and switch to production.
Stay tuned as we at Nulli pull together a migrate vs upgrade analysis that our client can take advantage of during the decision making process.
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