Tuesday 4 December 2007

Off to a New Start: Changes Ahead!

Doh, never thought it would be so hard to keep a Blog. Day to day business takes up so much time I never seem to get around to post new stuff. But, last night I gave a presentation to my co-workers about the things we're going to do around SOA, that I got triggered again to write some more.

What was it that triggered me? For that you need to understand the environment I work in. The company I work for, Inter Access, has a business unit Oracle Technology, where I am an architect. Within that business unit, we have 3 lines of business: Technology (mainly SOA projects), EBS (Oracle E-business Suite, focussing on Healthcare) and Managed Services. During my talk last night I realized that this will change in the next few years. Why? Well, I've been to Oracle's Open World in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and I've been to several sessions about Application Integration Architecture (AIA). AIA is supposed to be 'SOA out of the Box'. It's a set of predefined business processes (industry reference models) linked with a canonical data model to integrate all the different kinds of ERP solutions that Oracle offers. I expect that we will be able to extend AIA to also include other existing applications, as well as custom made applications.

That will mean that AIA will become the heart of the solutions we are going to offer. This will effectively lead to our separate skills on Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications will merge. Is this a good thing? In my opinion it is, as we will be able to support a larger audience. It will be a lot easier to implement an SOA when you have a lot of standard processes and default interfaces ready on the shelf.

We'll see.... it will take some time!

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