OFM 11g Q&A Session with Thomas Kurian

04 Jul 2009 by Simon Haslam (in Events)

As I mentioned yesterday, at the OFM 11g launch I was also invited (thanks to Oracle UK) to a Q&A session held with Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice-President of Oracle Product Development.

When asked about how users were said to have been frustrated with delays, Thomas said Oracle decided early on that they didn't want to force two upgrades onto users (i.e. OAS to 11g OC4J and then to 11g WLS) so had laid out their plans last summer and are delivering them now with this release. Cloud computing also featured heavily in the questions. For example, someone asked whether Oracle would be moving into the provision of cloud computing (like Amazon, Google or Microsoft). Thomas said that, at this point in time, Oracle was not focussed on actually providing the cloud computing facilities themselves as "renting commodity hardware" was not currently seen as profitable. However he added that Oracle has introduced a new licensing metric to allow others to provide Software as a Service using Oracle technology. He also pointed out that Oracle's Austin data centres currently run 225,000 physical servers with over 700 TB of storage, the implication being that Oracle would have the management skills to move in that direction if it so chose. Another question was how Oracle could still afford to spend $3bn in R&D in the current economic downturn, to which the reply was that Oracle had very tight control on costs, a healthy operating margin and wanted to continue to have a strong product pipeline for the future.

One very important question I had was about licensing, in particular for those users who already own Oracle Application Server and are paying for updates/support. This question has been vexing not only members of the UKOUG middleware community, but also of the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group because to upgrade to ADF 11g you also need to be running WebLogic. There have been various rumours that the only migration route was from OAS Enterprise to WLS Suite, and that the customer would have to pay the list-to-list difference in price (i.e. £6,094 per Oracle processor licence). Thomas said customers would be allowed to move from OAS Standard to WLS Standard and OAS Enterprise to WLS Enterprise, and that they wouldn't be forced to upgrade to WLS Suite. I specifically checked that OAS Enterprise customers who weren't using Forms/Reports/Discoverer would be allowed to move to WLS Enterprise and he confirmed this.

This is very good news for customers who have enterprise java applications running on OAS and whose administrators in particular will benefit from WebLogic Server. Trying to make a business case for the migration may already be difficult (development environments will need upgrading, training provided for developers and administrators, probably some new hardware, etc) without also having to justify a significant licence cost for what I think senior management would expect to be included in the Support & Updates fees.

Of course it does leave Forms & Reports users in a tricky position and this is an area that will warrant further discussion with Oracle. As it stands it sounds to me like Forms & Reports systems running on OAS Enterprise Edition will need a licence upgrade to WebLogic Suite, as this is the only edition that inclues these components. If you are running the specific OAS Forms and Reports licence I don't know what will happen as there is no F&R-only edition of WebLogic. I expect we'll see further clarification of the position on licensing over the coming weeks.

Finally, delegates at the UKOUG Application Server & Middleware SIG in March may remember that at one point there was the possibility of a WebLogic/SOA OFM 11g R1 and then a later "R1 plus" release that would contain all the traditional components like Forms and Reports 11g. I asked whether this release included everything - apparently it does, apart from ECM and BI which is following later in the year.

Overall I found the Q&A session very useful. Thomas came across as attentive and frank, despite being posed with some quite challenging questions. Much of OFM 11g is already mature (such as the core WebLogic Server 10.3) and I imagine that, providing licensing issues can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, we could see its adoption relatively quickly over the coming year.