04/20/09 :: [MOP] The End IS Near [permalink]
Sorry, I did not mean to scare anbody with this gloomy post title. I was referring to the post I wrote 7 years ago where I was talking about "the future of the application model". At the time I had made this prediction:
So let's face it there will be probably 3 infrastructure players left within a couple of years: IBM, Oracle (only if they care to be more than a database vendor) and Microsoft.
Ah.. I got the timeframe wrong (ok, I was very naive), but the players right. If it was a given for IBM and Microsoft, lots of people laughed at me when I mentioned Oracle. This year, IBM will buy Red Hat and Microsoft and SAP will merge. In the meantime, there will be 3 regional players left: Software AG, Progress and Axway and OSS will be under the total control of IBM and Oracle (ironic isn't it?). BTW, Sun didn't buy MySQL to do something with it, it bought it as a bait.
Interestingly, the world is suddenly divided between the SCA-rich and the SCA-less folks. I am wondering what a Cloud strategy could look like when someone does not understand composition. Maybe we Dave Chappell could explore this question.
Oracle's execution has been nearly flawless since the Collaxa acquisition. Today, Oracle's strategy is all but unbeatable. I am actually surprised that very few people have talked about "the Cloud" in the context of Sun's acquisition. Can you imagine the (enterprise) Cloud that Oracle could deliver (only if they care to be more than a business app and middleware vendor)? SalesForce is going to be joke: any enterprise application on demand !
Now it is a possibility that IBM could feel threatened enough and decide to buy SAP instead... either way, ABAP will not make it through the next decade.
We are definitely living the end of an era. Alea jacta est, the battle is now in the (enterprise) Cloud. Ah yeah, Google? I would say "not a chance". I even think, today, that Amazon will have a tough time to compete with Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. They may not have capitalized quickly enough on their first-mover advantage to cater to the enterprise.
Now, about the "future of the application model", well, it seems that I still need to speak at the "future" tense. When you see the level of discussions happening around BPMN, what can I say? I could point out that none of these companies have a strong interest to create a "process centric" application model, sadly.
One last point, I cannot but reflect on the energy that has been wasted in the last ten years, the number of projects that have been trashed and shelved. It sure will never be as visible as the Pittsburg's Rust Belt but it sure feels like it. The way I see it, the areas of innovation left open are security, (business) management and monitoring and information collection, access, search/rationalization and mining.