Chris Warner's Blog

I spent last week at Oracle OpenWorld with Larry Ellison and 43,000 of his closest friends. At the event JackBe announced support for Oracle Fusion Middleware, most notably Oracle Portal and Webcenter. Our announcement was based upon our newest mashup innovation: a powerful connection between mashups and portals in the form of a WSRP-compliant 'mashlet' connecting to our mashup API and using a portal-friendly single-signon paradigm via an LDAP authentication server. (We've got videos demonstrating this on JackBe TV and we'll be demonstrating it live on our November 29th webcast, 'Mashing the Corporate Portal'). As we've talked about many times in the past, mashups don't live alone. Mashups let the users bring together disparate information sources, even ones from the same vendor. And then send it places like RIAs, SOAs, and in this case, into portals via mashlets.

It was the 30th anniversary of Oracle and in case you missed the first 3 decades, it's an impressive growth story that ends with a whopping 300,000 customers. So it shouldn't be a surprise that OpenWorld is a monstrous show (the pictures don't really do it justice). More importantly, OpenWorld is also one of those events that can quickly remind you of how important software is to the daily workings of businesses of every kind. Take a peek at their product list and you'll see Oracle has products that store data, report on data, share data, move data, integrate data, transform data, and more. And at least 30 of these are from recent acquisitions.

Interestingly, it's that broad and ever-growing range of products that can be problematic to even dedicated Oracle customers. I spoke with all sorts of organizations both public and private: government agencies, system integrators, data processors, pharmaceutical companies, and even a bread maker. Every one had Oracle somewhere in their organization and most of them had it in many places. And I heard the same issue time and again, even in organizations dedicated 100% to Oracle: 'data from here, data over there, data to here, data to there, and no solution except formal integration or migration efforts'.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.