Integration Watch: Fusing a coherent Oracle

By Andrew Binstock

March 15, 2009 —

When Oracle bought BEA Systems last year, many pundits viewed the purchase as a good move if Oracle could put together a sound strategy for integrating the various pieces BEA's product portfolio into something useful. There was no doubt it made sense to fill out the DBMS and SOA story with a full-blown enterprise Java EE server and a wide assortment of well-regarded middleware from BEA. The strategic benefit of the move was to give Oracle a far more compelling story with which to battle IBM.

Prior to the acquisition, Oracle’s Java EE server was OC4J, a nimble server with a small footprint but lacking the creds of enterprise capacity. In BEA’s WebLogic offering, Oracle acquired a server that was better head-to-head than IBM’s WebSphere. Not only is WebLogic faster in terms of performance, it’s also consistently earlier in adopting key standards.

Another component in the stack that Oracle lacked, compared with IBM, was the JVM. JVMs are widely underappreciated as contributors to performance, and they carry an extraordinarily high bar to entry. Acquiring one of the three proven commercial JVMs was a coup in itself. However, the BEA JVM, called JRockit, is in a class by itself compared with its two competitors.

To wit, effectively every third-party server vendor runs its SPEC benchmarks using JRockit, and like WebLogic, the JRockit JVM is an adopter of new standards and architectures. For example, it was the first 64-bit JVM to be released for the Intel EM64T/AMD64 architecture.

But what really sets JRockit apart is incremental garbage collection (GC). In the other JVMs, GC is non-incremental: It occurs at unpredictable moments and can last for indeterminate times, during which the JVM can do little other work. As a result, those JVMs are highly unpredictable in terms of actual performance.

JRockit does constant, incremental GC so that its performance is much closer to a deterministic model. This predictable performance is a desirable attribute in absolute terms, but invaluable for IT departments under the gun to deliver against tight SLAs.

With JRockit and WebLogic, Oracle acquired the core elements of a stack that in most ways is better than IBM’s. However, BEA had the same stack when it was an independent company. And while it was successful with these elements, it did not enjoy a huge market share advantage over IBM. But Oracle has one more bullet in its belt: the Coherence cache, which it gained when it snatched up Tangosol in 2007.

Coherence is a large-scale, distributed, in-memory cache. Because of this architecture, it’s perfectly suited to grid applications. Coherence sits as a layer above the hardware, caching data and providing excellent data locality. Moreover, it has built-in fault tolerance, so nodes can go dark, come back to life and find the resources they need quickly. By favoring the grid approach rather than the cluster, Oracle takes another page from IBM and improves on it. The Coherence layer, from what I know of IBM’s product line, does not have a direct counterpart in Big Blue’s arsenal.

With the deterministic JVM, the fastest Java EE server on the market and the Coherence layer, the so-called Oracle Fusion Middleware stack is certainly the fastest infrastructure available today.

It’s also part of a larger, remarkably integrated stack: Below it is Oracle Linux, beside it is the Oracle DBMS, and above it are Oracle apps from the Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards acquisitions. Even Microsoft can’t deliver such depth and breadth, and it is the only other player who comes close. And honestly, almost every direct point of comparison tends to favor Oracle.

The aspects that are uniquely IBM's include hardware, of course, and its superior mainframe support. In addition, IBM has a much more substantial professional services arm. These are formidable revenue generators. Also, the hardware line of business and the services organization mean that IBM’s sales teams often have the first crack at new installations. Hardware is an advantage Oracle cannot overcome, and even the professional services organization would be difficult to duplicate by acquisition, although not impossible.

To win, Oracle must do what it has done: compete on the basis of superior technology and present the most integrated software possible, so as to capture the maximum benefit from existing accounts. What impresses me the most about Oracle’s execution on this strategy is that it has put it all together over the last few years. Five years ago, the Redwood Shores company was a DBMS vendor with a few enterprise apps. Not anymore!

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.

Related Search Term(s): BEA, IBM, Oracle

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2008 was still a buyer's market Though the economy slowed down, companies were as active as ever in the acquisitions front. Highlights include Oracle finally buying BEA, Hewlett-Packard buying EDS and Sun buying MySQL AB.

'Nothing to worry about,' Oracle tells BEA customers Oracle detailed its plans for integrating products from BEA into its portfolio of middleware products, saying it would continue development of the WebLogic application server. Many of BEA's developer tools will be rolled into Oracle's.

IBM, Microsoft voted best app servers in Evans Data survey In a survey of over 700 developers, WebSphere won out overall, beating Adobe, Apache and Microsoft. Oracle's WebLogic dropped the most places, while SAP's came in last due to incompatibility with non-SAP software.

Comments

03/15/2009 09:48:10 PM EST

Hello I'm the lead architect for IBM Websphere eXtreme Scale which is our DataGrid product which competes successfully with Coherence and Gigaspaces in this market area. You can read more about it at this link http://www-01.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/extremescale/

United StatesBilly Newport

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