SOA What’s new with Web 2.0

[Carl Ford]

Okay, this is going to take better minds than mine for the next year to get straight. My general rule for companies in merger acquistion mode is leave them alone for a year and then see where they stand. For Oracle, I have yet to find a timeline that works for the digestive process of companies. HotSip, TimesTen, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Telephony@work, Metasolv, etc - and now BEA. With Cisco, you always assumed IOS would eat the acquisiton and keep the developers. But with Oracle...nothing looks like a feature addition in Oracle DB. Its like the digestion of these companies is constipated. In theory, they should be the DB that does telecom best. In reality, I don’t see it.

Likewise, I am trying to get my thoughts gathered about MySQL being part of SUN. Is SUN going to better integrate JAVA into MySQL? Is Java going to compete for the P part of the acronym LAMP? Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) has beed driving a lot of the web 2.0 market for over a decade... Probably SUN digests MySQL better than Oracle does BEA, but that’s only the symptom not the trend.

The trend is that the stars are aligning for better integration of Web 2.0 services. Its time for the Service Oriented Architecture to be put to the test and for me personally, I am skeptical.

Here is why.

At 60,000 feet the web 2.0 guys are exciting as hell to watch and they can attract lots of people to play with their stuff. But nothing in the acquistion of trial users is as valuable as a usage statistic that shows real activity day after day. A discussion I was part of yesterday pointed out that 30% of the a specifically email strong companies customer’s had moved to Facebook because SPAM made email no longer valuable. In someways, I will make the case that many of the APPS on facebook are little more than mashup spam.
So what makes Web 2.0 valuable is the ability to control (and I mean regress) the trials to something more mobile. Network operators are looking for the API holy grail and Oracle and SUN are looking to be at the heart of giving it to them. This is where the story is in Telecom and the Internet today and VoIP is another set of initials that belong in the LAMP / SOA mix of tools.

[Thure Meyer]

You know I don't even think of Web 2.0 as an architecture - but we have had architecture without architects for thousands of years so the conceptual problems is probably mine. What I don't get is how Telecoms are going to reconcile Web 2.0 with their massive NGOSS (TM Forum) SOA based initiative, which seems to be the mother of all standardization efforts.

[Carl Ford]

Next month I will be in Mexico City, where are lot of architecture is accomplished one concrete bag on a time.

[Thure Meyer]

That's kind of what I'm thinking too. I live in Santa Fe and we still build adobe houses without plans and they turn out pretty good.

[Carl Ford]

i need an eithernet network management tutorial

[Andy Davidson]

Hey Carl

With my infrastructure hat on, your 30% figure fascinates me. What are we measuring 30% of - some kind of business metric that measured the usefulness of the actions taken from those emails, or are you saying that 30% of communications from one company to its community has moved over to Facebook ? Or something else ..

Also, are you allowed to name the company ? :-)

Andy

[Carl Ford]

It was a statement by a well known ISP. In effect they watched a 30% of the email traffic by their users as they adopted facebook and myspace.