I listened in on an Oracle briefing last week. Mostly it was an “Oracle success” advert prompted by the fact that Oracle now does about $1billion in middleware. This is not bad going, by the way, because it has been achieved because of product quality. Oracle is not the first name that springs to mind when someone yells “Middleware” in your ear. The major players are now BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with many others vying for attention.

What interested me more in this briefing was how quickly Oracle had latched on to the importance of Identity Management for SOA. It comes from getting involved in SOA projects no doubt. The point is that you cannot really manage a SOA environment ID management. Oracle bought their way into the ID management business. First they bought Oblix and then Thor then OctetString.

I remember looking at the ID management market about 2 or 3 years ago. It was full of small companies and I watched them getting eaten one by one. The big fish ate the little ones and now ID management is strategic. So watch the same thing happen to the Software Authentication vendors that I keep talking about in my AVID postings. They have the same destiny.

An interesting thing about Oracle is that it claims (and I’m inclined to believe the PR on this) that it is recognized as a leading SOA vendor. SAP and Oracle were destined to become SOA vendors or die. That’s how it is for the package vendors, large and small; either you eat SOA or SOA eats you. Oracle, I believe, has made a better start than SAP. They have the advantage of having very popular development tools and they have used it well, so far. They also have a thriving middleware portfolio. They have a good many parts of the SOA puzzle. But it is early days. SOA has many years to run.