"Vendors Are Now Building Service Based Applications"

Amit Zaveri, vice president, Product Management, Server Technologies Division, Oracle India talks to Biztech2 about the popularity of middleware software and how it is reshaping the way enterprise applications are built.

Do you think that the rising popularity of SOA will lead to a stage whereby middleware software will become more important to enterprises than regular business applications?

There is no doubt that middleware software tools are gaining traction and the greater interest in SOA is primarily responsible for fuelling this growth. There are some middleware components that are particularly useful in an SOA, including integration support for heterogeneous environments, Web services, client-server and event-driven architectures etc.

Automation of both structured transaction data as well as unstructured information, integration of information across platforms and across applications demands the use of middleware and these are absolutely crucial elements for improving systems capability and the level of networked enterprise computing.

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Due to the growth opportunities, a lot of business application vendors are now beginning to come into middleware space and are either bundling middleware with their offerings or selling middleware tools as standalone products. Recent reports and estimates have suggested that the middleware market is growing at a faster rate than the application market. People these days aren’t just buying packaged applications but they are also buying tools for integration.

However, will the market for middleware become bigger than the applications market in the coming years, is a question that only time will be able to answer. But the growth is definitely higher and increasingly enterprises are investing heavily in acquiring middleware tools.

Is this trend also affecting the manner in which enterprise applications are built?

Definitely! No doubt about it.

All the vendors are now moving towards building service based applications which can be better integrated and used to build composite apps. Earlier, a typical prepackaged application would more or less satisfy every functional requirement with the exception of customisation. These applications were very rigid and inflexible and customising them would be extremely difficult.

However, now customers are asking for very modular, service based applications which can be customised easily to support specific business requirements. Using this flexibility customers can for instance take the procurement habits of some application and tie that to a different shipping module, or can change the partner for order management, etc. So all these things, the entire workflow from order to cash, procure to pay etc can be easily customised based on business requirements allowing the customers to be extremely agile.

Application building has completely changed these days. The way we built applications five years ago and the way we do it now is completely different. The requirements of the customers are different and they are asking for greater modularisation. They want linked business services and flexible new workflows and they want to leverage their existing IT set ups. They want to take their existing applications and integrate that with the new ones. They don’t want to throw away their old apps but find a place for them in their modern IT architecture.

From a market perspective, how critical a role do you think your existing customer base has played in your middleware success?

Our large user base has played a very crucial role in our middleware success story. We posses a huge installed user base and we do want to ensure that we provide them with the right technologies. And a sense of familiarity does help when we try to up sell our middleware products.
Having said that a lot of the things that we see in the market and the activities in terms of making our offerings more standards based is something that we would’ve done anyway. We always knew that we needed to make sure that our applications are capable of working and more importantly delivering in heterogeneous environments.

One thing we observed, when we acquired Siebel and People Soft was that both of them had a customer base which was very different from each other when it came to their IT infrastructure. But we wanted to make sure that we supported their infrastructures. So we did strive a lot to make sure that we acquired the ability to interface and integrate with a lot of third party systems.
Also, it’s not as if we sell middleware to Oracle customers only. We also sell these products independently, as stand alone offerings to a lot of customers who build custom applications.