SOA: The little TLA that could

(Or, "It's not easy being green")

The skeptics among you might think that Service Oriented Architecture is just another Three Letter Acronym ... but think again. In the same 24 hour news cycle, this powerful concept has provided a new face for the Frankenstein monster of graveyard acquisitions that is Infor (see "Infor Announces SOA Roadmap" at Managing Automation) and a fig leaf to cover up the rather embarassing nakedness of the Microsoft Business Solutions code sprint to rationalize their own four ERP product lines (see "Project Green is Dead" at eWeek).

Translation for the buzzword-impaired: rather than rewrite all these products from scratch with modern technologies and a unified vision, both companies will just make a halfhearted attempt to draw connections between the various pieces.

Sigh. I liked it better when it was called EAI.

Update 4/16: Renee Boucher Ferguson at eWeek thinks the little TTC (TLA That Could) has brought down Oracle's Fusion Apps too. Dang! Is there anything this thing can't do?

Oracle to beat SAP with $3.3B Hyperion stick

OK, so maybe they're just softening them up before closing in for the kill. Here's the money quote from Chuck Phillips:

"Oracle already has PeopleSoft HR, Siebel CRM, G-Log, Demantra, i-flex, Oracle Retail, and Oracle Fusion Middleware installed at SAP's largest ERP customers. Now Oracle's Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data."

Wow. Here's CRN coverage, NY Times, and C/Net.

Larry hungry for German?

OK, we don't believe it either. But what if Oracle really is looking at SAP?

Graveyard > Magic Quadrant

Frank Scavo, over at The Enterprise System Spectator, reports that Gartner Group has decided that there aren't enough midmarket ERPs left to bother doing one of their famous Magic Quadrant analyses.

Wow.

Will the last one left turn out the lights?

SAP acquires Factory Edge

When your blog is called the ERP Graveyard, with images of tombstones and the stench of death everywhere, there's a tendency, perhaps, to accentuate the negative. Today's news brings a nice example of what appears to be more of a positive, strategic acquisition by SAP: the Lean specialist Factory Edge, which after all got seed funding from SAP's own venture fund.

Managing Automation has the details. Give SAP's Sudipta Bhattacharya credit for telling the story well: "We started out two years ago and said shop floor to top floor is key. Phase one involved support for the ISA-95 standard. Next, we needed Lighthammer to get visibility capabilities and analytics. Now, with Factory Logic, we will give people on the plant floor the ability to have a schedule."

Now, if SAP turns around and buys Infor, as Jim Shepherd at AMR has suggested, I reserve the right to take these nice comments back.