Oracle Debuts Fusion (again): Underscores Need for IT Governance

Watching the Oracle Open World festivities from afar, you certainly get the sense that there's lots happening in Larry's world. Aside from the headline news related to hiring Mark Hurd and the settling of the subsequent lawsuit, there's other serious business going on.  

From a pure product perspective, the news of the availability of the Fusion Applications in the first quarter of 2011 is worth closer examination.  While we've been hearing about Fusion for what seems like forever now, it's finally become a reality.  There are lots of folks who are going to ask what took so long but there are also many others who realize the enormous feat that is associated with post-acquisition integrations, consistent product versioning, and bringing together massive sets of data, tools, skills, applications, and code.  Given all of that, along with some other very public moving parts, five years isn't really that long to bring it all together in Fusion. But that's only if Fusion delivers as promised.

Of course, when you're talking about middleware, it's hard not to mention IBM.  And when you look at the way the Fusion stack is shaping up, you have to admit that it's oddly close to the IBM middleware portfolio, specifically WebSphere.     

With this in mind, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud shows just how serious Oracle is about cloud computing and may certainly be a deciding factor for a customer in an IBM/Oracle showdown.  According to Ellison, this 'cloud in a box'  is the first and only integrated middleware machine that allows users to scale from a quarter rack up to eight racks as a cloud, making it one heck of a scalable cloud environment.

Imagine being able to use Fusion as a cloud-based buffet of middleware -- now that's certainly a very compelling offer.  Just as long as it's being governed from end-to-end.  Of course, Oracle's AmberPoint acquisition will help that cause, especially given Fusion's SOA-based platform.  We'll soon realize how big of a role IT governance played in the development of Fusion.

Just keep in mind that in order for IT governance to deliver real value it needs to be:

1. Proactive: established at the onset of a project and not as an afterthought.
2. Automated: where appropriate so that IT developers and managers can focus on moving projects forward.
3. Company wide: to avoid issues in faulty software being distributed through the company through web services.

I'm looking forward to tracking more Oracle Open World news this week. And if you happen to be at the Moscone Center,  you may want to stop by the conference bookstore for a copy of "Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software."