Complete, Open, and Integrated—2009 and Beyond

Around the turn of the century, Larry Ellison stated that enterprises should not go out and select best-of-breed products from a range of different vendors that then would have to be integrated together by “the guys with the glue guns.” Much better, he said, to buy a pre-integrated suite—engineered from the beginning to fit together—that does not require such a “glue gun” approach. That pre-integrated suite, by the way, was supposed to be the Oracle 11i eBusiness Suite.

Clearly this strategy was not embraced by the marketplace, and organizations continued to acquire best-of-breed products that required integration. Oracle itself started to do the same thing, as was described in the previous section. With PeopleSoft (HRM/HCM), Siebel (CRM), Retek (Retail), Portal (Billing), and many other applications, Oracle bought itself an impressive range of best-of-breed products that required ... integration. At the technology level, by the way, it did something very similar. With Stellent, BEA, Sunopsis, Hyperion, and others, Oracle acquired superior, market-leading alternatives to some of its own products. Of course, these products, too, needed integration.