Today, Chuck Phillips, president of Oracle said that Oracle was committed to provide "A Single Stack of Technology to Simplify Enterprise IT".

I fundamentally question this premise.

In order for a "Single Stack" to successfully simplify IT, Enterprise Software practitioners must commit their entire Enterprise Architecture to a single vendor, namely Oracle. Recall that architecture is a *design* discipline. The absolute underpinnings of design is *intention*. This is a fundamental premise of my book, SOA Adoption for Dummies .

Handing your Enterprise Architecture over to Oracle is unrealistic. For end-users who want to capitulate and give up on IT as a provider of competitive differentiation, this might seem like a way of reducing cost and complexity. In the short term, they will be able to reduce their costs by eliminating most of their IT departments. However, in the long term, being beholden to the Dark Lord Sauron, the master of the ring will prove to be expensive.

In the shadow of Oracle's towers of Orthanc and Minas Morgul, Oracle launches 11g on all of middle earth.


Oracle has made a big commitment to Java with the acquisition of Sun.. to serve as the next layer up from SQL.

Is Java the one ring to rule them all? To some extent, Java certainly provides some nice unifying application logic for the Oracle stack.

But the true core is murky and nebulous at best. The demonstration featured discussion about SCA (Service Component Architecture) and the "Single Layer of Metadata". But the "Single Layer" alluded to by Chuck Phillips seemed to refer to the configuration management database that glues together all of the pieces of Oracles M&A Strategy. This makes sense because Chuck Phillips is in charge of Oracle's M&A strategy.

However, Thomas Kuran seems to allude to a "Single Layer of Metadata" in the "SOA Development" layer featuring their Java Software Developer suite, formerly JDeveloper.

When asked to demo the SOA Governance solution, the demoer seemed to be alluding to the "closed loop governance" capabilities of the Oracle SOA Governance Registry Repository. This product has its historical roots in BEA Flashline.

So instead of "Fusion Middleware" we have Confusion Muddleware.

Now if you add the WebLogic Apache Beehive, MySQL, Sun Identity Manager, JCAPS, GlassFish and all of the exciting middleware technologies coming from the Sun Microsystems acquisition, you have Contusion Scuttleware.


Miko Matsumura is Vice President and Chief Strategist at Software AG. This article originally appeared on his blog.