CodeFutures News and Commentary Blog

Oracle's Customers Paying the Price for its Market Domination

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:32:00 +0000

Oracle appeared to demonstrate market dominance in the past few weeks with huge list price increases for much of its product range; annual revenue increases of 25%, helped by over $20 billion in acquisitions (including BEA, which has boosted Oracle to the number two position in the middleware market); and an IDC report that shows Oracle leading the database market and even increasing market share.

However, all three indications of Oracle’s market dominance are someone misleading.

Oracle has increased the starting list price of its flagship Oracle 11g database to a seemingly outrageous $47,500 per CPU. For new database development projects, Oracle is under huge price pressure from Sun MySQL, Postgres, and Ingres. These open source databases will have the same market impact as JBoss had in the J2EE application server market – no up front license fees and annual subscriptions for support and maintenance. This trend will be accelerated in the database market by Sun’s decision to aggressively price MySQL and provide generous licensing terms – unlimited CPU use for a very low fixed annual subscription.

So why would Oracle increase list prices in a competitive market?

Apart from the obvious ‘make higher profits’ reason for price increases, there has been speculation about the negative impact on Oracle of the fall in dollar exchange rates. However, industry commentary tends to ignore a key factor in the list price increases: while many analysts mention that most customers do not pay list price for new licenses so the higher prices are just written off as ‘discount, they fail to understand that the real commercial effect will be in annual support and maintenance renewals. Oracle has a huge customer base that automatically pays annual support renewals as a percentage of the current list price for its deployments. So increasing the list price has a significant impact on this revenue stream. It’s effectively a pay rise for doing nothing.

The license fee increases are also interesting because they go against industry trends like subscription pricing rather than up-front license fees, open source software development, and Software as a Service.

Oracle’s financial results are incredibly impressive – net income for the year was $5.5 billion, up 29 percent on revenue of $22.4 billion, up 25 percent. This great news for Oracle shareholders and confirms Oracle’s reputation for commercial acumen. However, it means that Oracle’s customers are paying premium prices and contributing to exceptional profits.

The database market share figures published last week by IDC are somewhat misleading because IDC does not include data on database usage by developers (a good indicator of future deployment trends) or even current live database deployments. The IDC survey is purely based on revenue estimates. This seriously underestimates the market penetration of open source databases, and MySQL in particular, which now has over 50,000 downloads per day.

So while June’s headlines give the impression of Oracle market domination, the stories overlook factors such as the unhappy experience of Oracle customers paying over the odds to contribute to bumper profits and the likely impact of Sun’s aggressive database pricing since its recent takeover of MySQL.

IONA Acquired by Progress

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:01:00 +0000

It's been a big year for application development industry acquisitions - MySQL, BEA, Borland CodeGear, Cape Clear. It's now the turn of IONA Technologies, which has been acquired by Progress Software for $148.4 million. The acquisition follows a few false starts, including a bid from Software AG.

IONA's legacy CORBA product is widely deployed in the telecommunications and financial industries, although that can not be too attractive to Progress, which already has plenty of legacy products. Perhaps the encouraging results for IONA's new Service Component Architecture-based product called Artix influenced the acquisition?

Apache Tuscany Graduates!

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:53:00 +0000

Apache Tuscany has graduated to full Apache project status today!

Andy Grove made considerable contributions to Tuscany SDO during the early days of the project.

Here's the reference written by Kelvin Goodson for the vote on Andy gaining committer status on the project.

Andy has taken part in SDO Java and C++ discussions since November of
2006, in particular in the area of the Community Test Suite (CTS). As some
of you may not follow this closely, I've distilled quite a bit of detail
from the lists to show Andy's participation. He ...

- been active in creating and resolving numerous JIRAs
- did some of the work of the initial drop of tests to the SDO Java
CTS from Rogue Wave and in the CTS infrastructure design, including ensuring
vendor independence.
- has discovered and offered solutions to a number of anomalies
between the CTS and the specification
- developed and contributed tests for testing XML schema choice
function.
- provided good insights to the required and permitted behaviours of
implementations when dealing with elements which are nillable
- has taken part in discussions for an M1 release of the CTS
- Initiated discussions on DataHelper formats wrt dates and
durations
- developed new test cases for spec section 9.10 -- XML without
Schema to SDO Type and Property
- solicited input from the Tuscany community with respect to the
equivalence or otherwise of null URIs versus empty strings, in order to
feed back to the spec group
- took a significant part in discussions of how to ensure the CTS is
test harness agnostic, and provided patches to update tests to assist in
this goal
- contributed a set of tests for XSD complex types
- provided support to the community with problems running the CTS
and with insights into new Junit features

Aside from Tuscany, Andy has been active in the SDO Java and C++
specification efforts, and I think he will be a great asset to the project.

Regards, Kelvin.

So well done to Andy Grove and everyone else involved in Apache Tuscany!

Some of the Best Code Generation Links

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:42:00 +0000

Some of the best links on the Web related to Java Code Generation:

Code Generation Network
http://www.codegeneration.net/

JavaWorld: Reflection versus Code Generation
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2001/jw-1102-codegen.html

Applying Code Generation Techniques to the J2EE Development
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=389718

Wikipedia on Code Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_generation

Code Generation: The fastest way to write software?
http://www.softwarereality.com/programming/code_generation.jsp

Writing Code is Stupid
http://ianwij.com/weblog/articles/Writing_Code_Is_Stupid.aspx
Code generators help you deliver high-quality code quickly
http://techrepublic.com.com/5102-6329-5035011.html

Are you missing out on code generation?
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/15511

Code Generation Techniques for Java
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/09/03/generation.html

Bug Prevention with Java
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/03/31/codeGen.html

Code Generation in Action
http://www.codegeneration.net/cgia/

Generative Programming and Component Engineering Conference(GPCE'08)
http://www.hope.cs.rice.edu/twiki/bin/view/GPCE08/WebHome

CodeGear Finally Sold!

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:17:00 +0000

In what has to be one of the most drawn out sales in the application development market (the For Sale sign was hung out over two years ago), Borland has finally disposed of its IDE business line that is now marketed under the CodeGear brand. This includes the once dominant JBuilder IDE (a classic case study in the market impact of an open source competitor - in this case Eclipse). The CodeGear division was finally sold at a bargain basement price of $23 million to Embarcadero Technologies (a market leader in database products). It remains to be seen if the acquisition will result in increased product investment since Embarcardero is owned Thoma Cressey Brovo. Being owned by a private equity firm often means tactical pressure to produce profits to repay leveraged purchases rather than strategic product investments.

Java 6 for Mac OS X Leopard Released, Finally!

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Java for Mac OS X 10.5, Update 1 is now available from Apple through the automated Software Update service.

One thing to watch out for is that the release is only for 64-bit, Intel-based Macs - so you are out of luck if you have a PowerPC-based or 32-bit Intel-based Mac.

As regular readers of CodeFutures' blogs will know, we're becoming big fans of Mac hardware. So the long awaited Java 6 release for the Mac OS is very welcome.

Expect to see improvements to our Mac support in FireStorm/DAO soon.

New SDO Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:07:00 +0000

We have published a new SDO tutorial that provides a general introduction to SDO (rather than being product-specific).

Spring Versus EJB

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:57:00 +0000

JavaLobby has published an interesting article on job trends for Spring versus EJB. It appears that the job market for Spring jobs - and therefore commercial Spring development - is accelerating.

install4j 4.1 Launched

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:52:00 +0000

The new version of install4j, the installer used with FireStorm/DAO, is available. You can read about the new features here. ej-technologies has done an excellent job as usual.

Joe McKendrick on Selling SOA like Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:54:00 +0000

Joe McKendrick has written an interesting blog about how much easier it is to promote the use of Web 2.0 technologies compared with rolling out SOA in organizations. JackBe figured this out a while back, offering a product that combines SOA and Ajax technologies to produce rich enterprise applications and mashups.

Spring DAO Support

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Grove) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:12:00 +0000

Spring DAO support and Spring MVC support are two of the main new features now available in FireStorm/DAO 4.0 BETA. This release is available for immediate download from:

http://www.codefutures.com/firestormdao/download/

7 Mashups Every Company Needs

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:06:00 +0000

Check out this list of 7 Mashups Every Company Needs:

Customer Service: Mashup your call center application with package tracking

Client Prospecting: Mashup your sales prospects with external news, stock and company information.

Human Resources: Mashup your internal job postings with external resume services
Competitive: Mashup your competitive position in the marketplace.

Community: Mashup your product defect tracking with code management, time-tracking systems and blog commentary.

Research Information: Mashup relevant Medical, scientific and Law research with your own internal data.

Decision Dashboards: Mashup your product specifications, revenue planning, and product information with other products in the market.

You can read the details here.

Survey on Web Templating Frameworks

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:41:00 +0000

The Spring Framework Web site has an interesting survey on Web Templating Frameworks (the survey is located on the left sidebar of the home page, here). The survey shows that JSPs are the clear leader.

The CodeFutures Team

Cape Clear Acquired by Workday

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:49:00 +0000

After spending over $50 million, Cape Clear Software has been aquired by Workday - its main partner in the USA.

Worday has built its ERP-type SaaS on Cape Clear's platform - a decision no doubt helped by Aneel Bhusri, who provided the link between the two companies.

As usual, Dana Gardner is first off the mark with analysis.

Spring Overtakes EJB as a Skills Requirement

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:37:00 +0000

Rod Johnson uses job listing statistics to make the argument that Spring has overtaken EJB as a technology of choice for Java application development:

Job listings are a good indicator of the true adoption of technologies. They
indicate whether or not companies are spending money, making it possible to
distinguish substance from hype; they indicate the importance for developers of
gaining and growing the relevant skills (an important element of technology
perpetuation); and they provide a good guide to the safety for companies in
adopting a particular technology.

CodeFutures can confirm that we got so many requests for Spring support in FireStorm/DAO that we just had to do it.

John Crupi on TV!

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:20:00 +0000

JackBe’s CTO, John Crupi was a guest analyst on Fox Business Network. You can watch the video clip here.

JackBe has also been in the news recently after winning the Best Enterprise Mashup Platform in InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Awards.

Sun Acquires MySQL

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:17:00 +0000

Sun has acquired MySQL for $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. The move is consistent with Sun's recent open source strategy and should certainly shake up the market by making Sun a real player in the database space. It's said that only 1% of MySQL users actually pay for deployment support - but that does not change the fact that Sun will now have one of the key parts of the LAMP stack. I presume that Sun will try to leverage MySQL to sell more X86 Linux hardware into LAMP stack users.

It should be noted that MySQL is Sun's second open source database product (Java DB is the first).

Oracle Buys BEA

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:23:00 +0000

Oracle Corporation has finally concluded the deal to acquire BEA Systems Inc. for $8.5 billion.

Will products be cut? Probably. Will prices rise? Definitely!

seeMore Wins Best Database Middleware Award

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:15:00 +0000

seeMore Technologies has won InfoWorld's Best Database Middleware award.

This is what InforWorld has to say about seeMore:

This brilliant tool from seeMore Technologies will enable a large enterprise to gather its far-flung databases -- regardless of their origins -- under a single, relational roof. The Virtual Database Server seeks to provide access to just about any data source, even flat text files and highly structured COBOL databases, through standard ODBC, JDBC, or OLEDB interfaces.

OASIS Now Promoting SDO

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:36:00 +0000

OASIS has finally started promoting its efforts with SDO by distributing a press release.

Anne Thomas Manes, as usual, is spot on with her analysis:

"Each type of data source (databases, documents, web services, and enterprise application systems) exposes a unique set of APIs, protocols, and formats, increasing the complexity of an application," explained Anne Thomas Manes, Vice President and Research Director for Burton Group. "A unified data programming model allows developers to focus on business logic rather than technical details."

Spring Framework support

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Grove) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:46:00 +0000

Development work has now started on version 4.0 of FireStorm/DAO and the main new feature is a code generator for the Spring Framework. This new code generator will generate Spring JDBC DAO classes and a Spring MVC web application. The Early Access release for customers will be available in December 2007 and the a public BETA program in Q1 2008.

FireStorm/DAO 3.2.1 GA

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Grove) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:36:00 +0000

FireStorm/DAO 3.2.1 GA is now available to download from the following location:

http://www.codefutures.com/firestormdao/download/

The release notes for this release are available from the following location:

http://www.codefutures.com/firestormdao/download/installer/README.html

Gartner's Top 10 Technologies for 2008

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:43:00 +0000

Dan Farber & Larry Dignan have published an interesting analysis of Gartner's top 10 technologies for 2008.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Enterprise Mashup Development Videos

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:03:00 +0000

JackBe has done an excellent job with its JackBe TV - everything you need to know about Enterprise Mashup development on videos.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

FireStrorm/DAO 3.2 GA

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Grove) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:33:00 +0000

FireStrorm/DAO 3.2 GA is now available to download from the following location:

http://www.codefutures.com/firestormdao/download/

The release notes for this release are available from the following location:

http://www.codefutures.com/firestormdao/download/installer/README.html