Why not use the Oracle Siebel acquisition as the justification for a SOA initiative? <\/p>\n
If you are a Siebel, Oracle or Peoplesoft customer its time to establish SOA governance organisation, with representatives from across the organisation (don’t forget to include procurement, because these are the folks with the skills to hammer a vendor down in pricing negotiations). <\/p>\n
Otherwise Oracle could establish an unacceptable level of account control. The question going forward – will you manage Oracle or it will it manage you?<\/p>\n
What savings can you make in software licensing?<\/p>\n
What middleware choices should the organisation make going forward?<\/p>\n
What vendors will you use to balance Oracle dominance? And the related question – what is the role of IBM and Microsoft in the structure? How will you play these vendors off against each other? BEA might offer you middleware independence, but it would be risky to assume it will remain independent for long, given Oracle’s current hot streak.<\/p>\n
Its time to assess all your databases and platforms- DB2, mainframe, mySQL, MS SQL Server and so on. Oracle will likely exert pressure to reduce use of other databases.<\/p>\n
Your Oracle strategy has implications across the organisation, including servers and storage. Are you scaling up or buying into the Dell commodity story? Is grid about resource allocation and virtualisation, or is just an Oracle scaling mechanism? These are all questions worth asking.<\/p>\n
What are the new expectations of both the lines of business and different parts of the IT organisation? What do you expect from Oracle and do you a corporate line on what you expect from this acquisition engine?<\/p>\n
This could be an opportunity to rethink corporate desktop and client strategies. Siebel 7 was disappointing. Vista is coming. What about Eclipse-based rich clients?<\/p>\n
The Oracle Siebel acquisition is therefore possible a very useful event for customers of both companies.<\/p>\n
A SOA governance organisation needs to include both people across IT but also some line of business representation. That means customers of Oracle database and middleware, and Oracle applications, as well as the Siebel center of gravity. Enterprises should immediately carry out an inventory to better understand all the touch points between Oracle and the enterprise.<\/p>\n