Oracle buys SOA management vendor AmberPoint

Oracle on Monday fattened up its already burgeoning middleware stack, announcing Monday that it has purchased SOA (service oriented architecture) management vendor AmberPoint. Terms were not disclosed.

SOA refers to a systems design approach that eschews monolithic applications and instead designates various processes, such as running a credit check on a customer, as interoperable “services” that allow code to be flexibly reused.

AmberPoint’s software is used to monitor the performance of SOA-driven applications and help users solve problems. It is “highly complementary” to Oracle‘s own SOA software and will “enable increased control and performance of critical applications across the enterprise,” according to an FAQ document Oracle released Monday (PDF).

It is not clear how the deal will affect road maps for AmberPoint’s products. A review is under way and more details will be forthcoming, Oracle said. Investment in the products is expected to increase, according to the FAQ.

“AmberPoint was one of a dwindling group of still-standing independents delivering runtime governance for SOA environments,” analyst Tony Baer said on the OnStrategies Perspective blog.

The move “patches some gaps in its Enterprise Manager offering, not only in SOA runtime governance, but also with business transaction management — and potentially — better visibility to non-Oracle systems,” he added.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year.

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“Need a job in IT? The cloud needs you?”

It’s always interesting to me to see the job growth in emerging spaces, such as cloud computing. Typically, the hype is huge around a concept (such as SOA, client/server, or distributed objects) about 8 to 12 months before there is notable job growth. This is often due to companies not understanding the value of the new technology, as well as to the lag in allocating budget and creating job reqs.

Cloud computing seems to be a different beast. After no fewer than four calls last week from headhunters looking for cloud architects, cloud engineers, and cloud strategy consultants, I decided to look at the job growth around cloud computing, using my usual unscientific measurements. This included a visit to the cloud job postings at indeed.com, which provides search and alerts for job postings and tracks trends.

I figured that I would see a line that looks like the bunny slope, gradually sloping up from left to right. Instead, as you can see below, I saw extreme heli-skiing: Since January 2008, the growth in job postings that mention cloud computing has hit 350,000 percent. (Of course, those are all kinds of job postings that mention cloud computing, and some are perhaps not cloud computing jobs. But still.)

While I just have my personal experience to draw upon, this seems to be the largest inflection around a hyped space in IT that I’ve ever seen, especially considering we’ve been in a downturn in which many companies have reduced IT jobs.

There are only a handful of qualified people out there who actually understand the basics of cloud computing, much less the details behind cloud computing architecture, implementation, development, testing, and security. Thus, I suspect we’ll see many jobs filled by the wrong people — and the bad results that come from that. The larger issue is that the people doing the hiring also don’t understand cloud computing, so they don’t realize that the “expert in Amazon cloud service” claim on a résumé actually means the candidate can purchase books and shoes using the site’s “one click” feature.

First, and foremost: I will stay fully employed. 🙂

Second, the salaries of cloud computing experts will be driven up significantly as too many jobs chase too few qualified candidates.

Third, the need for cloud computing training will explode, including architecture, planning, testing, security, and deployment. There’s lots to learn there, and it’s very different than on-premise systems, trust me.

Finally, we’ll have to deal with the many positions that will be taken by less than qualified staff. Thus, there will be some frustration around the productivity of cloud computing that in most cases will be traced back to a talent issue, not the technology itself. We saw the same thing with SOA.

Start that training and update your résumés, people.

Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the Cloud.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they us.