Two and a half years ago, when he stepped in to help Oracle get back into the application server business, Thomas Kurian had quite a tough row to hoe. Now he has 19,000 customers. JDJ explores with Kurian his 30-month journey, and asks too about other aspects of emerging technology seen from the Oracle perspective.
In JDJ last month, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz claimed the "death" of middleware, so my first question to Thomas Kurian is inevitable, given his role as a champion of middleware for Oracle. What does he make of Schwartz's claim?
"Those who say such things are being facetious," replies Kurian, bluntly. "A company that says that there is no role for middleware means it in the sense that it feels its own operating systems incorporate middleware facilities. Such a company is bundling proprietary middleware into the OS as a vehicle to try and lock customers in."
Kurian compares the current situation vis-a-vis middleware with relational databases in the early days.
"Early on, relational databases were primarily just query engines, and the information management infrastructure was very rudimentary," he explains. "Over a 20-year period, relational databases have incorporated a number of specialized features and functionalities - clustering capabilities, data warehousing capabilities, security for the data, and so on - and today you might argue there is certainly a lot of change still in database computing, but people see it as a much more mature infrastructure for information management.
"Now with first-generation middleware," Kurian continues, "the killer application was to deploy processing logic into a J2EE server and scale up the application so lots of clients can access it."
Now he believes that what we're seeing is an "evolution" of middleware.
"During the early phase of such an evolution obviously the rate of change is higher, but over a period of time these technologies mature and at some time in the future - in two, three, five years, I don't want to make a prediction - there will be a much more mature application infrastructure, and while there will continue to be change it will be at a lesser rate than today."
Does Oracle see greater opportunities in this mature phase, I wondered.
"Part of the process of maturation," replies Kurian, "is that customers want to eliminate all the piecemeal componentry that they had been using and shift to a more mature platform that offers a broader set of services.
"When we entered the market two and a half years ago with our integrated application server we were the first to integrate all these pieces into one app server. That to us is the biggest opportunity from a business point of view. The customers that we talk to validate this again and again - telling us how they save cost and time, either from a development perspective because they can use a single development tool and framework to do a lot more things, or from a deployment and management perspective because they have a much simpler and easier-to-manage infrastructure. It saves them a lot of cost and gives them a lot of value and that's why we continue to invest so heavily in making this vision a reality."
